That shot was taken at home in the lounge, a black umbrella formed the background, a clamp held the knife, and the camera was on a tripod. I played with the position of the knife until the light (daylight) caught it just right.
The most recent work on the assignment was Curved. I decided to use the tracks left by car head/tail lights on a long exposure. Last evening I stood on a bridge over the A41 near Berkhamsted and waited for the light to fade. ISO 50, f/22 and 1 sec - that didn't yield the results I wanted, so wait some more.
Whilst standing there, getting cold hands, along passed several police motorcycles with their blue lights flashing, their riders looked up at me :-(, thirty seconds later was another bike, and several unmarked cars escorted by a couple of regular police cars.
After reading several articles in recent months about photographers being treated harshly by the police, I was a little concerned that I might get a visit on the bridge.
Excuse the quality of the photo, I was trying for long exposures and didn't have the change to change the ISO (I was on 50) and exposure to the point where I might have gotten something sharper.
Anyway, I didn't get a visit by the police and I'm still none the wiser regarding who was being escorted.
I got a couple of nice shots out of the evenings work, this is "Curved" for my assignment:
And this is just the coloured sky through some trees - a pleasing silhouette.
Back to the projects, I've not really made a stab at project 8. The notes suggest going into the streets and taking 20-30 pictures showing how you approach and shoot a subject. You are to keep the camera to your eye whilst looking and developing the best shot, taking pictures as you proceed. Now, I'm a pretty introverted person, and getting out on the local high street with a camera clamped to my eye and taking pictures which include lots of people (who I've not asked permission from) does fill me with a certain amount of dread. I might do this at the local zoo, where people are expecting cameras.
3 comments:
Richard, I'm very interested in how you are finding the course. I just discovered the existence of the college and am drawn to the idea; it seems a good fit to me. But it's a non trivial expense even to sign up for one course so I'm looking for some info and found your blog.
The exercises you are doing all seem pretty good, if standard, but I'm wondering how is the interaction with the tutor?
That's the main point it would seem that you are paying for -- otherwise you could just read a book... By in extremely indirect route I am here because of reading Michael Freedman's "The Photographer's Eye" which is a great read and mind stretcher (for me at least).
I'd love to have professional and educational input and guidance -- rather than the random,and sometimes cruel, comments one gets on flickr etc.
How do you feel OCA scores in that regard?
Hi Raymond, at the moment I'm a little stalled. I've been busy building a photography studio that I am going to use to pursue portrait photography in a professional capacity.
Personally, I've not had much interaction with my tutor! I wasn't supplied with his phone number or contact details at first ... but he was supposed to contact me and didn't. I think other people have very different experiences. I'd suggest posting a question to the very active flickr group The Open College of Arts to get some more opinions. There are also some discussion threads where people have asked questions about why the should/shouldn't join TAoP.
I've just bought the Michael Freedman book and the course seems to take a more practical directed learning approach with very similar materials.
Thanks Richard, that's very helpful. I've spent some time reading through the old posts in that flickr forum. It has "managed my expectations" as they say because I would have been expecting a lot more tutor interaction without having read what I read there.
I suspect what I'm looking for is more like "coach" or "mentor" rather than tutor(=assignment marker).
Still keep it on my list but perhaps lower done. Being realistic I wasn't even able to keep up with Jeff Curto's History of Photography lectures which are only two hours a week and without doing assignments (I did read the course text though which is great). So probably don't have time for TAoP.
About Freedman - some posts in flickr say he wrote the course book for TAoP, right? I hadn't realized, but it makes sense -- that's why the course was mentioned in an interview with him.
One problem with reading all those posts in flickr is that people don't indicate what level they are or their expectations. For example it wasn't until after I made my comment above that I looked at your flickr account and realized you're a "flickr star"!
At your level what you get out of the course would be entirely different (more or less I don't know, but surely entirely different) from what I would.
Anyway thanks again for your comments, they are most helpful.
Yours,
Raymond
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