After changing the contents and organising the order of webpages, I’ve finally decided how my online doco will be looked like, regarding its graphic style and structure/page format.

First of all, since the topic of my doco is about lomo cameras, I’d like to follow the unique graphic style which lomography has - colorful, vivid, relaxing and fun. By Using ‘Photoshop’, I would be able to manipulate "lomo" style in a digital form. Secondly, the structure of my website will be divided into three parts, but each of them would have some pages linked to each other in order to create a more integrated interface. Here are the three areas for my doco:

This is a section where the history of lomography is going to appeal. For people who have no idea about what ‘LOMO’ or ‘Lomography’ is, it is essential to give them a brief introduction regarding lomography.
Furthermore, I will give examples about the functionality within different lomo cameras. From here, the browser can take a further step to the lomo users in ‘LOMO Who’ section.

Community is the theme here. For lomo community. it exists both online and offline. LOMO Homes under lomo’s official website and lomo pools in Flickr are probably the strongest online communities acting internationally.
Like in one of Jenny’s lectures, LOMO Home is a perfect example of the notion ‘ Technosocial communities: prosumers, professionals and metadesign".
The offline community is hard to find as I am new to Melbourne, so I took a chance pumping to the shops where they sell lomo cameras and see whether if I could get some information. Fortunately, the staff in Genki is extremely friendly and allowed me to record an interview from her. 

This section may be the fun part for readers, no matter you are a lomographer or not!
For my curiosity and for the doco, I did search the lomo community in Melbourne. Having going through the lomo shops and looking for lomo people in Melbourne, I got some positive feedbacks. Therefore, this section is about  the interviews and photos from lomo users from Melbourne and Tokyo, Japan. Some pages will have links to ‘LOMO Where’.

I’ve been in Australia for three and a half years, yeah, for some international students, it is a long time for studying overseas. Luckily, I have the chance going back to my country - Taiwan - once a year because the summer vacation in Australia is relatively long and as well as I miss my family amd friends back home. Funny how, everytime I went back to Taiwan, I always had internally contradictory feeling to my country. In one way, I could have any Asian food which I’ve been missing so much anytime, and I could spend time hanging out with my friends and my family instead of making phone calls. In another way, I didn’t feel comfortable being in Taiwan, I guess it’s because I already got used to the life style in Australia. Even people were talking in my native language - Mandarin, I still couldn’t join the  conversation easily because they were talking about things I wasn’t familar with, laughing at some jokes I no long feel funny anymore. 

However, I do also have some sort of problems in English (you can easily find it as you are reading my blog). As what Juicy Day wrote,

"I got a serious problem of cross-culture communication. The language certainly is the main barrier. I mean not only in the situation that I have to communicate with people in the tutorial or lecture in English, but also in the situation that I use Mandarin to talk to people from different areas."

both cultural differences and suficiency of English causing some communication difficulties, or even misunderstandings sometimes. But, I have to say: thanks to those Australian classmates and teachers, your enormously patient do help us (internatinal students) a lot! I appreciate your kindness and friendliness.

As doing a real-life community as small small world does, my online documentary communities ‘Lomo’ had more problems than theirs, although the outcome was the same – smelling like roses.

One of the biggest issues I had was getting interviews completed by people I hadn’t met in person. I sent questions by email, but got only a few responses. I think some people didn’t reply because they probably couldn’t trust a faceless interviewer and an outsider to their world. Being new to the Lomo community, I haven’t yet built a relationship that people can trust. However, I did get some great responses and positive feedback from others, and also the shop owners were very helpful (except one that wouldn’t allow me to record their voice).

Building a website is not as easy as I thought. I have been exposed to Dreamweaver, but haven’t had the opportunity or the reason to master it. So I have spent many hours researching how to do technical things that weren’t taught in any classes in Transient Spaces, but found in websites and other tutorials. And even the tutorials are sometimes hard to follow, or might not be specific to my needs. And even though we are not being marked on the technical aspects of our online doco, having the story of the community presented aesthetically pleasing to the audience is going to give me better respect in the community I am presenting. Furthermore, being a published website for the world to see, obviously I don’t want to have a site full of faults.

More? Yes, there is more! My ipod froze after transferring  information from my home iMac to the school’s iMac. Then while doing this blog entry, after writing it all, and saving it, the whole page just disappeared! (So this is part 2!)

But even with all the problems that might be experienced doing all these things, it is good to learn these things to make sure next time they don’t happen again!

 
Take a look at some images I used one of lomo’s cameras–SuperSampler at my Flickr.