Has it flown by that fast? Last time I sat down and thought, “hey, I should write about my photography class”, and suddenly it’s time for it again. Geez. Today was a…. “long” day. A three and a half hour meeting will do that though. Basically I got in, prepped for the meeting, went into a pre-meeting with $boss to talk about things, make sure I didn’t leave out anything at the real meeting, leave office, sit down, stand up, and go into the real meeting. The meeting wasn’t that bad. The three and a half hours went relatively quickly as there were some interesting things going on. I managed to monopolize some of the time as I’ve taken the reigns on a new process for doing the installs and basically documenting the process from sale to completion.
Last weeks photo class was pretty good, we went into film, developing, and flash. My flash is a bit sucky. Better than nothing, but nowhere near as cool as it could be. This is another one on the list of “stuff I want to buy” of course.
This weekend was actually really interesting. I had asked $teacher the week before if he needed someone who was wanting to learn and worked for free, and he said if I wanted to tag along he was shooting a wedding on Saturday. So Saturday I donned good clothes (how strange they feel!) and wandered into Abbotsford. I watched what he did and how he did it, and got a feel for what’s involved in shooting the wedding. A lot of pre-planned shots. Not so much staged as a tick list of “shot of rings, shot of bride walking down, shot of guest book signing, shot of putting on ring, shot of parents, shot of grandparents”. I got to shoot as well, getting a few candids here and there of people around. I only got one that I’m pretty happy with, and that’s more because it’s not as bad as the others 🙂
Basically not having a flash other than the on camera flash meant that my pictures either were a really slow shutter speed so they were blurred and/or too dark, or the persons face had that deer in the headlights look you get from the on camera flash (light coming from too close to the lens means the face has no shadows and therefor looks more like a white blob). $teacher on the other hand had a nice flash with a softbox around the head which softened the light to give all his shots a “natural” look.
So that was really interesting. Good pay for a half a days work too, and he’s a cheap photographer to have because he has a day job. Something to think about if I ever decide to change careers 🙂 Not sure how well I’d handle the stress of YOU HAVE TO GET THIS RIGHT THE FIRST TIME OR THE WEDDING IS RUINED!!! though.
This weeks class is on portraits and he asked us to play around a bit. I convinced Firefly to model for me and got a few shots. Couple of things I discovered… first of all, it’s all in the lighting. I was able to fix some shots up in photoshop, but a lot of it has to do with the lighting. I was working with a desk lamp and two floor lamps, each with about a 50 watt bulb in them, so that made things… pretty dark. That in addition to everything being a horrible shade of red/yellow (thank the photo gods for RAW and color temperature correction) made things interesting. A couple turned out though (IMHO) which I’ll be taking to class to see what he or others think.
In class I have to say I’m definately in the more advanced area. I’ve basically been absorbing everything I could about photography for the last couple of years so on the technical side, and on the “what should happen” side. I know some of the rules, I know about hyperfocal range, I know which side of the hand has an exposure of 18% reflected sunlight. I try to keep my mouth mostly closed though to let other people answer.
Of course the reason I’m in the class is because I want to make my picture taking skills better. Knowing the sunny 16 rule won’t help you take good pictures, it’ll just help you take properly exposed ones if your meter is broken 🙂
My list of “stuff I want to get” is getting long again, and expensive. I do have a bit of extra $$ around, but instead of spending on frivilous toys what I should spend it on is things like the house, mortgage, paying back RRSPs, and all that boring junk.
Oh, and that paperwork I worked on till late last night? Totally forgot it on my desk at home instead of taking it to work to fax in. Bah.