back to school

I’m back in the classroom for ten weeks, I’ve started a course on creative photography. Photography’s often a solitary (sometimes lonely) activity and it’s not often one gets a chance to discuss one’s work with anyone else and when you do it’s rarely in in any depth and classroom assignments provide a useful, external focus for one’s work. Going back to school seemed the best way to move things on.

There’s an assignment every week plus some study work and a long-term project that runs for the duration of the course.

The first week’s assignment is over now – Beyond the postcard – starting with a postcard of a tourist site, go there and photograph it, then stop, close your eyes and note the non-visual input. Then photograph some more, taking these extra stimuli into account.

I made a tactical error, I chose Tower Bridge – it was far too big and it took far too long to get around to get the shots. And time is something I’m short of right now I made an technical error with the light too and accidentally under-exposed most shots by at least a stop. It was an interesting exercise, but I’m particularly not happy with the results, nor the process, truth be told.

But there was a plus, I found having an assignment made me take the whole process more seriously and made me more confident about going for shots – stepping forward to get the pictures, rather than lurking in the background, like I normally do. As a result, I ended up with a lot more pictures of people, a subject I usually avoid.

Anyway the albums for the first assignment are here (in time this is where they’ll all appear), you can judge for yourself whether it was a worthwhile exercise or not.

postscript

Made yet another mistake, I didn’t bring prints of my work, so I got no feedback on it from fellow classmates – I need a class on going back to school.

This week’s assignment is about landscape photography, I hope this works out better.