Ready Kids › First Screens › Badge 1 › Lesson 1.1
All courses›First Screens›Badge 1
The background gives you away
Spot the thing in a photo that tells a stranger where you are, before it goes up.
1Watch
One photo, slowly
One photo, slowly
A kid takes a selfie on her front step, grinning. The camera drifts off her face to the number on the door, the crest on her jumper, the street sign at the corner. It ends with her thumb over Post.
22 secondsWatch what the camera finds once it stops looking at her.
2The idea
You are not the interesting part
You looked at your face, the light, whether you look good. Fair enough. Anybody else looking at that photo sees everything else first: the door number, the crest, the sign. They are not being clever. Those things are just there, in focus, and you put them there.
A photo of you is also a photo of where you are. Your face is the one bit of it that does not give an address. Everything behind you might.
3The idea
The three giveaways, and the three-step check
Nearly everything that gives away a place is one of three things. A number (your door, a bus, a car plate). A name (a street sign, a shop front, a parcel label). A logo (your school crest, a club badge on a kit). Faces and colours tell a stranger nothing about where to find you. Numbers, names and logos do.
So the check is short.
1. Look past your own face.
2. Find any number, name or logo.
3. Crop it, cover it, or move to a different wall.
It takes about five seconds, and only works if you do it before the thumb reaches the button.
4The idea
The front step, done properly
Back to the girl on the step. Step one, look past her face. Step two: the door says 42, her jumper says which school, and the sign at the corner says which street. That is a number, a logo and a name, all in one frame. Together they are an address and a timetable.
Step three. She does not delete the photo or stop smiling. She takes four steps sideways to the plain brick wall of the house, same grin, same light. Same photo, no address. Nobody looking at it later would ever know she moved.
5Say it
Three words before the thumb gets there
Say this out loud, before you post, every time
“What else is in this?”
Ask it before the thumb reaches the button, not after. After is too late to be a question.
6Decide
Which of these would you post exactly as it is?
Pick one to carry on.
7Your turn
Find the giveaway in four photos
The giveaway hunt
Four photos, one after another. Tap the one thing in each that tells a stranger where it was taken: a road sign, a door number, a badge, a shop front. The photo blurs it when you find it, and names which of the three kinds it was.
Some take a while. That is the point. You do not see it because you were not looking for it.
8Find them
Which of these give away where you are?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
9Do it
Before you leave this page
Open the last photo you took. Find one number, name or logo in the background you would crop out before posting it. Say what it is out loud, then crop it.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
Before you post, look past yourself. The background is talking.
Next lesson: Everyone in the picture has to agree