As the week goes on, it seems to just keep getting hotter and hotter! Today was pretty intense: 101 by late morning. Tomorrow, it’s meant to be 104 by noon! So we may as well, get comfortable in the heat.
We started this morning reviewing our selected images from last night. Even though there were some pretty amazing flower photos, Wendy reaffirmed her embargo on these ubiquitous pictures. Otherwise, it was a pretty successful critique! The students seem to have grasped the concepts pretty well and we are ready to move into the more difficult ideas of today’s lesson: Depth of Field and motion blur!
Our running volunteer this time was Shiran, one of our students from our advanced workshop. He, and his TA partner Nabil, are working with us this week to help instruct the new students. Usually that means they are looking over the shoulders of the beginner class students as they struggle with the camera controls. Today, it means that Shiran is going to run back and forth across the stage endlessly so the other students can practice a technique called panning. On and on Shiran ran, as our students panned first right, then left, then right, left, right, left…for what seemed like an eternity. With our students first shooting slowly, then more and more quickly, they learned the process for freezing motion, blurring someone in motion, and adding pan blur to their images. It was a bit of a tough lesson, but eventually we got it. After lunch we sent everyone out for a repeat of yesterday afternoon’s exercise: shoot around campus minus the flowers. The kids came back with some interesting images and only a few flowers. But all in all, we feel pretty ready to tackle our first assignment day. We will be leaving early tomorrow morning for the first real test.