Tuesday, October 07, 2014

OPEN Ealing's Photography Course - week 1

Yesterday I started attending a new photography Course (week 1 of 11) led by two women Monika Drzewicz and  Lauren ( professional name Panther Rooney )at OPEN Ealing.

OPEN now have sparkling  new premises  and although the WiFi isn't working yet the room they have above the café seems very suitable for classes and learning.
The new 'OPEN'  home

The course kicked off with us all looking at our cameras and joining a discussion on what we'd like to see included which seemed a good idea topics are going to include generic types like  Portraiture, Landscape and Street and also cover things like lighting and Macro photography (very close up).

The plan is to take pictures too and critique them we'll hopefully have a mechanism to share files or just use USB stick to enable sharing.


These is also an intention to have an 'OPEN' Photographic exhibition from our portfolios.

Both Mokina and 'miss Panther have studied photography at the local University (UoWL) and are also practitioners so were able to bring a lot of expertise and judgement to the session.
We can show pictures on a big screen

Monika has had a number of exhibitions and Miss Panther  has had quite a bit of magazine work published.
Out of the box - it's complicated

We all had a good look at our cameras and started to look at some of the less standard aspects, like synchro-flash for example.

Those attending had both a mixture of devices (compact to Digital SLRs) and of experience - from those who had worked in visual media to those who were fairly new to cameras.

We also spoke about the relationship between aperture (F-Stop e.g. 5.6), shutter speed (e.g. 1/60 second) and film speed equivalence (ISO) as well as depth of field.


What I got from the session was a realisation that I know far less than I thought I did (true generally) and that my camera is quite a complex piece of equipment (Canon SX280 HS), particularly when you move away from the auto settings.

We have been given a task to take some Landscape pictures and I will see what I have already and what I can add to these while exploring more the  manual functions of my camera.

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