Spotlight On Charlyjl

Charlyjl is one of the people who took my Potential Giant Squid Challenge at Squidu and successfully accomplished her goal of becoming a Giant Squid Lensmaster on March 31st!

She has graciously offered to share her best Giant Squid tip with us and also talk about several of her favorite lenses. 

Here’s NEW Giant Charlyjl in her own words: 

I think the lenses that I would most like to feature are my ‘Australia’ series of lenses, which started with:   My City: Canberra, Australia –  and now features 7 lenses – from Australian Christmas Carols, Aussie Rock Legends and one of our Bush Fires. I started with the Canberra lens, just for something to write about.  I had been looking at the Squid tips on lens creating ideas and writing about your home town was one of those examples.  From there, the creation of new lenses became a little easier.

I created my lenses on Vegemite  and Aeroplane Jelly   because they are truly ‘iconic’ in Australia.  The Jingles that existed for the two
products and the marketing have ensured their general use in the average Australian household.  I knew that there would be a few Youtube videos that would be great to share and there was lots of information to share.  Creating these lenses were a lot of fun and I learnt a lot more
about the topics…. which was a big bonus.

My Aussie Rock Legends series really came about because my kids asked about an artist who appeared on TV recently and they didn’t know who he was – so I went to YouTube and looked him up – the number of videos available really inspired me to create lenses around my favourite
singers.  Sharing some of our great artists, that don’t necessarily make International acclaim has been great.  We have some amazing talent in
Australia, and I love to share….

The most difficult lens to create was the Canberra Bushfires .  My motivation for this lens was the recent Bushfires in Victoria and being able to share, from a personal stand point, just how scary it was and promote the Bushfire Appeal for Victoria  - providing some financial aid for those who have been devastated by the fires this year, was a big motivation.  I found this lens to one of my challenging because of the memories it bought up.  I was really surprised when I saw the footage on Youtube that was available from the Canberra bushfires – and definitely shed another tear or two when watching them.

Charlyjl’s Best Giant Tip

My best tip for lensbuilding is to write from the heart.  

Choose a topic you’re interested in, use the resources that are available on the Internet to include information – but make sure attribute your sources if you are using all their content.  I treat the creation of a lens a lot like a school project – I research a topic, find interesting information and then write my text modules by combining what I find.  Sometimes, I’ll find an interesting Video on Youtube and I’ll structure my lens content around that, or I’ll find a series of interesting photos and write about those (see Amazing Striped Icebergs as an example of that).