All posts filed under: Articles

kids-in-pool-Modewest-column

Icarus

What separates a good photographer from a great photographer is not necessarily skill or vision. The thing that’s needed in order to become a great photographer—or great anything—is awareness. When I was learning yoga in my 20s, twenty years ago, it was very important that I be aware of the position of each of my muscles and coordinate my moves with the inward and outward flow of my breath. The visible—what the observer saw—mattered less than what happened in my mind: did my mind guide my body through the asanas or did I daydream and let my body move on autopilot? The thing that applied to yoga twenty years ago applies to photography today. Once you have passed the initial stages of apprenticeship—once you know your equipment and have become friends with light—the only thing stopping you from taking great photos is your mind; whether you pay attention or not. Awareness is hard and uses up a lot of energy. I remember being drained like a bathtub after my first longer photography shoots a few …

bedroom-siesta-afternoon-nap-Modewest-Lifestyle

A Workday Siesta

In Australian business culture, we’re used to getting up at the crack of dawn and working long hours. Proof of our dedication to early mornings and long work days is the tradition of ‘breakfast networking’, which usually starts at 7am. And yet, despite waking up so early, we work all through the day until late at night and become increasingly sleep-deprived in the process. Should we perhaps take a cue from the Mediterranean countries where the Siesta—the combined midday lunch and nap—has been part of the national psyche for hundreds of years? According to CQ University’s Professor Drew Dawson—author of the nation’s largest study into Australian sleeping habits with over 13,000 respondents—the main reason for our stubborn refusal to sleep are gadgets with screens, such as iPhones and tablet computers, that we take to bed with us. Staring at the light shining from iGadgets until late at night tells our brains that it’s still the day. As a consequence, we find it difficult to fall asleep and end up staying awake when we should be …

essential-oils-bottles-lavender-Modewest

Basics of Essential Oils Part 1: Aromatic

Essential oils are unique in that their efficacy begins at the aromatic level. Unlike pharmaceutical drugs, an essential oil need not be ingested, nor even applied like a medical cream, to affect your body to heal. The simple act of smelling an essential oil begins its work to heal the area of your body that requires attention. Penetrating the brain barrier The aromatic compounds in pure essential oils rise up the nasal cavity and are first detected by olfactory cells that are part of the olfactory epithelium. The olfactory cells are nerve cells with extended cilia (hair-like structures) which have receptors that bind to specific odour molecules. When a receptor binds to an odour molecule, the olfactory cell sends the signal through the cribriform plate (bone barrier between the nasal cavity and brain) to the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb in turn sends impulses to five different structures in the brain. Each of these five structures has a different response to the impulse, and a specific function to undertake. • The amygdala stores and releases emotions …

world-globe-social-media-Modewest-Marketing-SEO

The Mystery of SEO

The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and—besides your specific area of expertise—it is possibly the most important concept for today’s small business owner to understand. “Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the act of getting website pages to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs) for targeted keywords,” defines Aaron Agius of Louder Online in Sydney. Whether your clients find your business on the internet depends on how well you have managed your SEO—or whether you have managed it at all. If your business is online—and in this day and age it should be—it’s time to get familiar with the way search engines work. When we talk about search engines we’re really just talking about Google. While there are other internet search providers—such as Bing and Yahoo—they are still marginal compared to Google. What follows, then, is a short introduction to the internet as Google sees it, and as it wants you to see it. According to Aaron, SEO can be divided into two broad categories, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. Simply …

buildings-clouds-cityscape-Modewest-Workplace

Business in the Cloud

There you are, waiting for your third coffee of the day, a million ‘to-dos’ running through your head, and suddenly you hear the calm-looking guy in front of you say, “Yeah, I run my entire business from the cloud.” Somehow, he looks more organised, more streamlined, more everything than you—but is it all a big bluff? And what is this ‘cloud’ thing, anyway? Laurel Grey of Get Digital Flow in Sydney gives us a weather forecast. “The reality of running your business in the cloud is that, eventually, you will have to get there,” says Laurel. “The even harsher reality is that the road to effectively running your business from the cloud might not be as straightforward as many IT gurus would have you believe.” Laurel warns that it is easy to get carried away thinking that your business is going to earn you money 24 hours a day on complete autopilot with just a few cloud-based tools. Getting to that point takes months and years of dedication and time set aside to get things …