Assignments

So we are now in week 5 of a ten week course and we have done a photographic assignment for each week so far, using the techniques we’ve studied during the week. According to the website, the aims of the Assignments are as follows:

1/. to get you practising the theory

2/. to get you sharing your work

3/.to help you learn with and from others.

 

This is done by allocating ten image ’slots’ on the OpenStudio image-sharing website to each student each week, asking them to upload a specific number of images produced as part of that week’s coursework (usually five or six) and inviting them to use the surplus ’slots’ for any images of their own choosing. Each student is part of a group of about twenty students for each week’s assignments and the brief includes looking at images submitted by other students, offering constructive critique and suggestions.

This caused a lot of heartache among students for several reasons. Some didn’t want to hurt other students’ feelings by making a less-than-complimentary comment about the image. Others felt they couldn’t put into words their feelings about another student’s image. The least confident students on the course simply said that they didn’t feel able to make any constructive comments. This was because they considered themselves ‘unqualified’ to do so given their minimal experience. Sometimes students said they looked at an image but, because they couldn’t think of anything to write about it … just passed over.

The first assignment was simple, quite straightforward and fun.

Choose one of the following activities:

Select six letters from the alphabet and take a picture for each letter. Do not just look for letters on signs; think creatively about the shapes in nature and of objects – for example a rope laid on the ground may become an s or a w.
OR
Take six images of familiar subjects from below waist height or above head height (not at the normal head height). Try to find a subject that you can photograph from above and below and from the side. Take at least one shot which is close up to the subject and one which is taken from a distance. Use this opportunity to give an unusual perspective on a familiar subject.
OR
Choose one landscape, one portrait and one still-life subject and make two versions of each image – one horizontal and one vertical.

Using our new knowledge about the fundamentals of image composition, placement of subject, light and shadow, colour and perspective, most of us found ourselves actually thinking seriously about the image we were intending to produce with our camera … before we pressed the shutter button. (I use the term ‘most of us’ because it was clear from the start that there were a fair number of already very experienced photographers on the course. This may possibly have been one of the reasons that some of those students who were very new to photography suffered from a severe lack of confidence)

I chose the ‘letters’ option and was amazed at the breadth and variety of ‘letters’ that were portrayed in students’ images. It had the desired effect of getting us to think ‘photographically’ and taking notice of our surroundings in new and different ways.

Some of my images from T189

I thought it was about time that I posted some images seeing as how I’m three weeks into T189 now! So I’ve selected what I think are my best three images from the first part of the course but you can see the rest on my Flickr photostream.

Aqua-Marina’s Flickr Photostream

Assignment One – “Select six letters from the alphabet and take a picture for each letter. Do not just look for letters on signs; think creatively about the shapes in nature and of objects – for example a rope laid on the ground may become an s or a w”.
This is my letter ‘S’.

Image submitted for Week 2 assignment of T189 – your favourite person, place or thing. I love our beach!
I spotted this incredibly dramatic sky developing just as we finished dinner, so I abandoned the washing up, grabbed my camera and headed out to the beach. It was difficult to catch the full effect because the sun was still bright enough to dazzle my Finepix F700 compact and I had to wait, fiddling around with the settings until I was rewarded with this shot. I took about twenty in all but this was the best.

Image submitted for Week 3 assignment of T189 – an exposure safari. This perky little chap(ess) is currently feeding two constantly ravenous youngsters and visits our kitchen windowsill several times a day for bread and scraps. I opened the window and took a photo while he/she looked at me as if to say “Stop messing around – I need food – NOW!”

I hope you enjoy them!

Thoughts about commending on Flickr

I wrote this response to an appeal by the Admin of the Amateur Shutterbugs group on Flickr for members to comment on other members’ images:

Personally speaking, I find it very difficult to comment on an image if it has just a title and nothing else – no time of day, location, note of anything unusual. Just a little extra information about the image to provide you with a ‘hook’ into commenting would be really good.

Sometimes, since Flickr is very much a global community, you even have no idea where it was taken and you have to scrutinise the tags to see if they offer any information.

It’s even worse when it’s just a generic filename – something like DSC_39357 – which implies that either it’s part of a huge bunch of images uploaded in one go without any attempt to be selective or the Flickr member just couldn’t be bothered to think up a title or even consider why he/she was uploading the image in the first place.

While trying hard not to hurt feelings, it’s good to be as constructive as possible about an image and not just post the generic “Great image!”. Most folks who are serious about improving their creative photography skills (not necessarily those with the latest and most expensive whizzy-dizzy kit …) are happy to learn from other points of view. Not everyone will see the same image – some will pick up on one aspect and others will comment on something different.

It’s also quite time consuming to study an image and write an intelligent comment – I know I tend to do this on images I like and pass over images that don’t appeal to me so much. This is a bit lazy really – sometimes deliberately commenting on something you’re not keen on can teach you something about your own perception.

It certainly made me think …..

End of Week Three

Well, weeks one and two were quite fun and reasonably light but in week three we are starting to delve into the esoteric settings of aperture, shutter speed, ISO and f-stops. This is where things get very interesting and really quite technical. I don’t think my camera manual has been studied so intently since I got it in May 2005.

So what sort of camera am I using? Well, it’s a Fuji Finepix F700 which I bought as a refurbished camera in May 2005 from a shop in Exeter …. the day before I headed off to the Chelsea Flower Show for the very first time. It was incredibly exciting and I just charged up the battery then snapped my way around Chelsea on auto until the battery died

Fuji Finepix F700 Zoom

I think the course was written with compact cameras in mind but there are an astonishing number of high-end Digital SLRs turning up – mainly Canon models with breathtaking price tags. My Finepix F700 is quite capable but it can be used very simply on auto or with the ‘Scene’ modes (Night, Portrait, Landscape and Sport) or the macro mode for close ups. It has a 3x optical zoom and a 2.2x digital zoom. Unusually for a compact, its ISO range goes up to 1600 and the shutter speed can go from 3 seconds to 1/2000th second. Through some clever technical stuff, it’s actually a 3.1 megapixel camera but claims to be able to produce 6.2 megapixel images. I can set it to take images at 6Mb, 3Mb, 2Mb or 1Mb.

Of course, as I learn more about the technical and artistic sides of photography, I am starting to hanker after a more advanced and capable camera so I’m looking around for something suitable for a birthday present this autumn. Watch this space!

Oh, and if anyone is interested and would like to check out the images I’ve produced so far for T189, my Flickr site is:

Aqua-Marina

Busy!

I’ve hardly had time to update this blog because I’ve been so busy – work, home, family, photography, gardening … oh, and we managed to fit in dinner out twice last week.

T189 is settling down now and students are getting used to the online website format and the OpenStudio image sharing site. Being a first time presentation, there are a few glitches which have been irritating or downright annoying but the Bank Holiday weekend fiasco seems to have been sorted out now.

Course modules are not appearing on the website fast enough for many students who are now facing the prospect of being away on holiday for part of the course. When T189 started, we had week one and week two present on the website but all the other links went nowhere. Week three appeared two or three days ago and students are begging for week four to be posted because they need to be ahead of schedule (many are taking other courses alongside T189)

However ‘modern’ it is for a course to be online, there are always those (including me!) who prefer to sit down with a hardcopy and highlight/make notes/add sticky notes etc. So T189 provides a print-friendly version of each week. I printed out week one and it was about 20 odd pages while week two was a little more but week three was nearly 50 pages! Bear in mind that the online version contains flash animations that you can play with to illustrate the point being made in the text – increasing and decreasing saturation was one, displaying the different between normal/telephoto/wide angle was another. These do not print out in the printable versions.

When I did T185, the course team provided a post-course PDF version of the course that registered students could download for a limited amount of time and subsequently keep on their computers. This PDF was not available to non-T185 students and the link disappeared after about a month. But it was a good idea.

I keep meaning to post my images here but I haven’t got round to it because they’re not all uploaded to Flickr …

Back to the beginning – some pre-course advice

When you register for T189, you’ll be sent the course materials as explained in a previous blog post and a letter giving you your Open University computer username and a password. My first piece of advice would be to log in to your OU Student homepage here:

Open University Student Homepage

and check when your course website opens.

Then, if you go down the page a little further, you’ll find a section entitled Your Links where there will be a clickable link to the Open University server you’ve been allocated to for your course. T189’s home is on Server 2 along with the Science, Technology and Maths courses whereas Server 1 is the home of the Arts and Humanities courses.

If you click that link, you’ll go to the browser version of the relevant First Class Server showing your personal mailbox, the Practice Forum, and a few other general Open University conferences. Just before your course starts (the date will be shown on your StudentHome page) your course conference should suddenly pop into being on your desktop as a small icon. T189 has, of course, a small camera icon. My advice is to get in and say ‘hello’ because it’s amazing how keen OU students are to get off and running with a new course! If you need any practise at using First Class, drop into the Practice forum to post a message or two, reply, quote and so on to learn the ropes.

Thirdly, it’s a good idea to set up a T189 Bookmarks or Favourites folder in your browser where you can keep important web addresses like the course website, studenthome and any other websites that you find as you study. Quick instant access can save hunting for web addresses later. This can save your sanity further along in your course when you wonder where that really interesting website was that had such valuable information for your studies. Trust me – been there – done that!

Back to the conferences. Any conference with unread messages will display a red flag. If you read any messages that contain useful information, you can use File > Save to save a copy of the message on your hard disk for future reference. Create a folder for course conference messages so you can keep them neat and tidy – you will rue the day when you have to trawl back through hundreds of conference messages looking for that one with the golden nugget of information …

Start of Week Two

T189 actually started on May 1st which was a Tuesday so the weeks are a little unusual. Nevertheless, students are forging ahead eagerly and the number of week 2 images that are already on OpenStudio is quite daunting.

Back to the problems with OpenStudio – I suspect the tech teams are working frantically behind the scenes this evening because not only is OpenStudio timing out repeatedly, but so is the T189 website itself. So students can’t access either of them. It doesn’t help that the section on the website titled ‘News’ has been unavailable for almost the entire first week of the course which is rather annoying. A simple message explaining the problems would have been a good way of saving a lot of students a great deal of anguish. It’s obvious that a lot of thinking caps are going to be needed to make sure this kind of fiasco doesn’t mar the second presentation of T189. Knowing the OU, I’m pretty certain that they’ll have ironed out the glitches ready for the October 2007 start.

In the meantime, despite the obvious grumbles and declarations of extreme discontent, the T189 forum conference discussions roll onwards, gathering newly arriving students and dispensing invaluable information from more experienced folk on the course.

Major Glitch

It’s almost the end of the first week’s study in our ten week course and we have a major glitch. OpenStudio has been under so much pressure from students uploading their first ten images that it’s fallen over! One student worked out that, when he was uploading his images, there was an image being uploaded every ten seconds….

Of course, it’s a Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK so the Open University’s computer department is only running on a skeleton staff and it looks like the problem might not be fixed until Tuesday.

This was the cue for the course conferences to fill up rapidly with endless queries and pleas from students who are having difficulties uploading their images to OpenStudio. Moderators and other students fielded as many as possible – there was even an automatic-opening message posted in the conferences which popped up as soon as you double clicked it to open the conference. Some students are resorting to banging their heads against walls, others are heading for the coffee pot and many more for something stronger. Many are feeling angry, aggrieved, frustrated and just plain cross.

So this is probably NOT the start to the course that the course team wanted and there is obviously a lot of frantic behind-the-scenes activity going on trying to resolve the problems. Bear in mind that this IS the first presentation and that there are always glitches with the first run. Just be glad that we’re the ones doing the guinea-pig impressions here and not you – by the time you get round to tackling T189, we’ll have smoothed out all the wrinkles for you!

Setting all that aside, T189 is actually shaping up to be a very interesting course. There is lots of activity in the course conferences – help and advice being sought and given, plenty of interesting and constructive comments being made on student images in OpenStudio (when it’s up and running anyway) and, generally, a good atmosphere.

A Camera

So it’s a digital photography course and you need a camera!

The OU’s advice, as given on the T189 course details page, is as follows:

“A camera that will enable you to manipulate and share your images as digital files. Obviously a digital camera is designed to do this – your digital camera should be 2 mega-pixels or more. It would also be acceptable to submit digitised versions of images captured using a film camera. Whatever camera you use, it is preferable if it has some controls or settings (e.g. shutter speed, aperture or automatic settings such as ‘sport’, ‘landscape’ or ‘portrait’), as the course will teach you about the full range of controls and settings that a photographer uses. However it will also be possible to complete the course using a basic camera with little or no control over its settings”

To date, a staggering 58% of students on T189 are using sophisticated DSLR cameras in the £300 upwards price range which amazed me. Mine is a compact midrange Fuji Finepix camera (now under the archived cameras list …) which cost me about £120 having been reconditioned by Fuji. (However, as the ever-wise moderators pointed out, it’s the eye, skill and observation of the photographer that creates the image – not the cost of the camera being used!)

Fuji Finepix F700 Zoom

Steve’s Digicams – Fuji Finepix F700 Review

There are also fairly specific computer and internet requirements for the course (Elements will only run on Win XP or Vista) and broadband, although not strictly speaking necessary, is definitely a boon when it comes to viewing a lot of images online! Make sure you check out the ‘You Will Need’ section on the T189 course details page

Unfortunately the Open University does not support Apple Mac which caused rather an outcry from devoted Mac users who had signed up for the course – after all, Macs are widely used in the creative, graphics and publishing worlds. But most seemed to find a way around the lack of support … although not without some grumbling …

T189 course materials

So what is inside that exciting T189 parcel that arrives from the Open University shortly before the start of the course?

Firstly, you’ll find an introductory letter from the course team welcoming you to T189 and a printed checklist so you can ensure you do have everything that should be in the parcel (as well as instructions on what to do if you are missing something). You’ll also find:

- the Open University Online Applications CD containing the computing guide and software for studying online. This has plenty of information about the online services offered by the Open University together with a selection of software, some of which you might already have and some you won’t need. (Especially note the information about Lyceum which is audiovisual conferencing software and only required for a small number of courses) Software usually includes Adobe Reader, First Class Client, antivirus software (has been Kaspersky in the past) and Star Office suite. Also provided might be a Typing Tutor, the OU’s own Profile program which you can use to track your personal and career development, print CVs and keep records, the OU’s Sesame Screensaver, DirectX, a program for zipping files, Java, Macromedia’s Shockwave & Flash programs, and the Mozilla Firefox browser.

- the T189 Video Tutorials DVD which contains all the video tutorials on installing and using the Adobe Elements 5 software that students use for their T189 work. Note that some students weren’t particularly happy with E5 and preferred to carry on using Photoshop or other programs. However, the video tutorials all use the E5 software to illustrate how to perform tasks so it’s not a straightforward choice.

- the Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 CD which is the software used for the course. This software requires a special serial number when you install it which can be found on your OU Student homepage under the T189 course details and each student has an individual number. This software is supplied as part of the course and is yours to keep and use throughout the course and afterwards. Note that the software license only allows this software to be installed on one computer – there is no legal provision for installing it on a desktop AND a laptop for study purposes.