On the second morning of my Easter break I got up at 6:30. On Easter Sunday morning I was up at 3:30. this is not usual behaviour for me. On the Saturday morning I was asked to do an interview with BBC Wales Good Morning Wales about the 4am Project. My fellow interviewee was Karen Strunks, professional photographer, [...]
On the second morning of my Easter break I got up at 6:30. On Easter Sunday morning I was up at 3:30. this is not usual behaviour for me.
On the Saturday morning I was asked to do an interview with BBC Wales Good Morning Wales about the 4am Project. My fellow interviewee was Karen Strunks, professional photographer, blogger and founder of the project – it was she who inspired me to get involved.
I saw her speak at the Talk About Local 2011 conference in Cardiff a few weeks ago. She told us how she started taking photographs at the ‘magical hour of 4am‘. The time between night and morning when you can pretty much have the streets to yourself.
I was drawn to the creative idea of looking as something so familiar in such and unfamiliar way. But also by the idea that you can do something individual and very local while taking part in a global event. In more than 40 countries, thanks to the power of Karen’s web and social networking efforts, people have been getting up at 4am to take pictures.
As Karen was giving her talk, I tweeted a few things and immediately had a response from New Zealand – they were looking forward to taking part on 24 April. Karen hadn’t even got to that bit in her talk yet and here was someone on the other side of the world excited to see more people getting involved.
I tweeted that it would be good to do the project in/about Roath, my local area in Cardiff. Journalist and blogger Ed Walker agreed and set up Facebook and flickr groups. Fairly quickly there were 50 Facebook members.
The radio presenter this morning thought it might all look a bit dodgy – groups of people roaming the streets taking photos! In the end four intrepid souls braved the early morning start.
For me, the most interesting part of the project in many ways was seeing first hand how a great idea has spread itself through the various channels.
Karen uses her blog, twitter, flickr and the website to run the project – but also goes to speak to groups that might be interested. I was at the conference because I saw it on twitter and it was tweeting that got me involved – showed me it was global and also that there were people interested locally.
Ed set up the Facebook group, we both tweeted about it and he blogged about it over the Easter weekend (as did I). The Guardian Cardiff blog gave it a mention and has integrated it into its own photo sharing project for the month. And I then did the radio interview.
How did the BBC know about it? People in the newsroom there had picked it up through twitter and thought it sounded interesting.
It’s been interesting to see the combination of web, events, traditional media, social networks and blogs working together to make the project happen.
Check out the pics from Roath here; the whole 4am Project is here and here’s a post about the event on the Guardian Cardiff blog. I’ve blogged a few thoughts about it here too.
April 28th, 2011
