Day 12- Still Life Part 2

Everyone always seems to come late to both of my guys classes. Not really sure why. Before class began, we had to do some quick re scheduling. Wednesday and Thursday are Afghan holidays, and the Sharwali is closed, so we couldn't have classes on Thursday. Instead we'll do a two hour class on the next class today. Starting an hour earlier. They all assure me that they'll be able to come on time for it. We'll see how that goes.

Not so sure why, but very few pictures for this assignment. But, thankfully, everybody was present, so I told them I expect every single person to be turning in assignment for the next class.

Said Bilal

Said Bilal

Samir

Safi Ullah

Safi Ullah

Jawed

Omid

For this class, since they're missing one, they have a double assignment. In addition to their still life photograph that I want them to take, they have the next classes assignment, which is two photos, the first, a photo of a single tree, and the second a picture of wind. As wind is not something that's visible, they're going to have a fun time trying to find a way of capturing a picture that gives the viewer a distinct feeling that it's windy. As Afghanistan often has dust storms and is quite windy, I'm hoping this will be an easy assignment. I'm also wondering how many people are going to show up with all three assignments, they have plenty of time.

Same problem for the next guys class, everyone's late. Since I don't have time to run a 4 hour class (2 two hour classes), instead, they'll have a regular one hour, then the next class they'll run a 2 hour class. They also assured me this would be no problem, despite the fact that most of them can't make it on time on a regular day, they say they can make it an hour early in two classes. We shall see.

A lot more pictures in this class than the first one. Still, overall, not so many sunset/sunrise pictures. And 0 low light pictures from anyone. Must not have done a very good job of explaining that one to my students....

Nasir

Nasir

Nasir

Hameed

Hameed

Hameed

Nasir

Nasir

Hameed

Hameed

So apparently I didn't get a much better turn out. I guess I just got a lot more pictures from a lot fewer people. Realized that as I was going through and naming everybody and was naming the same two people for each picture.... so great job Hameed and Nasir.

This class has just the one still life assignment. They'll get a double assignment after the next class since that'll be when their two hour class is. Since today I believe was the first day that I had every single one of my 7 older students show up (half an hour late in some cases, but showing up none the less) I told them that I expected 7 people with still life photographs. They had the excuse that I wasn't here last class or something like that. I didn't get excuses from everyone because I thought I had a lot more people turning in assignments, should pay more attention as I'm collecting next time....

All Rights Reserved by photographers, 2010, for all photos. Please contact info@fablab.af for individual rights.

Day 11- Still Life Part 1

Now I remember why I was supposed to update every day or max 2 days, because now that I've taught two girls classes I don't really remember much about the first one. Interesting.

The school was having a seminar in the classroom we usually use, so after some phone calls we were able to get another room to teach in. Not a huge turn out on the sunset/sunrise portion, and not a single low light picture. Of the pictures that I did get, some were pretty good, others were alright, but what was really great was that of the pictures I did get, it was picture after picture after picture after picture. All sorts of different angles, heights, through the trees, on top of the compound, everything. I was excited. This is exactly what I've been looking for in the girls, taking a lot of pictures from different ways, some will turn out really bad and others will turn out unexpectedly great.

Overall, I was pretty happy. One of the pictures that I really liked was a sunset picture that the girl took that didn't even have the sun in it. This is one of those thinking outside the box type deals that I think is an important quality to have in photography.

Shazia

Masooda

Masooda

Maliha

Shahnaz

Shazia

Shazia

Shahnaz

After we reviewed the photos, we started to learn about still life photography. For this, what I wanted them to learn from it was how important it is to understand the background in pictures and the lighting. Lots of times it's hard to control these things, but you always need to be paying attention while taking the photos. In still life photography, every aspect of the photo is under your control. I want them to play around with backgrounds, objects, lighting, everything. After this they'll hopefully get a better understanding of what a difference in the pictures these things can make. Spending so much time focusing just on these elements, I'm hoping it'll help them to pay more attention when taking pictures where they can't literally go around re arranging everything to make it just right.

Shazia

Masooda

Shazia

Suraya

Shahnaz

All Rights Reserved by photographers, 2010, for all photos. Please contact info@fablab.af for individual rights.

Day 10- Understanding Exposure Part 2

Naughty naughty students. I finally had an entirely full class, meaning all of my students were present. Two of them didn't have any pictures at all because they had to go to a wedding party. For 3 days apparently. And another student, instead of taking macro pictures of flowers, took pictures of professional macro pictures. tisk tisk. Guess he didn't think I'd be able to notice the copyrights written on the bottom left and right hand corners of all the pictures. Or that these photos were nowhere near their capabilities, especially with the cameras that they have.

As for the rest of the class, this was a really smooth class. My students came in, I collected the pictures, they pointed out their macro ones, and we were able to review them. Some pretty good pictures starting to show up with these guys. Another positive, they did not find a way to involve themselves in the macro photos. A few people were holding the flowers and you could see parts of their fingers, but I don't think that counts.

As far as the changes being made, this class wasn't really effected much, their course was cut from 4 weeks to 3 weeks, but they aren't helping me as the girls will with the second group. I just need to get 20 more male students at the end of this three weeks, which won't be too hard. Especially since Said Jalal tells me everyday that the rest of his students are upset that they don't get to take the class, as if hearing it enough times will make me say, oh, alright, they can start taking it halfway through and use imaginary cameras....

Because we want the kids to be able to teach more and more students, I think for the second class of males I'll let Said Jalal and Hidayat trade off teaching the two classes and I can be there to aid them, so that I know they'll be teaching the right things and after I leave they won't just start making up all sorts of stuff instead of saying that don't know what they're doing.

So I put up 16 pictures from the one class the day before. I'm loving these pictures and putting up a little less that'll look like a lot more. About 11 per class. I did originally say this blog was going to be mainly pictures and minimal words. For anyone who was curious about what I meant by there are tons of crazy awesome flowers in Afghanistan during Spring to take pictures of, here we go. Also a little better view of some traditional Afghan food. But like the girls, the pictures were mostly all flowers. 22 picture exhibition, here we go. Pictures:

Said Bilal

Safi Ullah

Samir

Samir

Said Bilal

Safi Ullah

Omid

Omid

Jawed

Jawed

After we reviewed the pictures, we learned all of the same things as the girls class. The exposure triangle, and the various effects you can pull off by adjusting them in different ways. The assignment was the exact same as before, 2 pictures, one of a sunset/sunrise, and one of anything taken in a low light condition. This time the students asked me before they left, "Can we have people in our pictures?" So the thought hasn't completely left them, but at least they're double checking before hand. I told them that the sunset/sunrise picture should not have any people, but the low light one can be of whatever they want it to be of. The sunset/rise pictures are going to be challenging I already know, they've never taken a general scenery photo, they've always been focused on a specific thing until now. Time to broaden their horizons...

The second male class, oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. Everyone but one person showed up, and the big unexpected thing for me this class was.... Nothing unexpected happened. That's correct, absolutely nothing. Hurray! I'm just sitting in class as they're all filing in, bracing myself for some crazy unexpected thing that could happen nowhere else in the world, but nishta. More good news, some great photos from this class. Really really good photos in this class. The second half of my macro photo exhibition:

Hamid Jawed

Hamid Jawed

Hameed

Hiyat Ullah

Hamid Jawed

Hamid Jawed

Hamid Jawed

Zarif

Nasir

Nasir

Nasir

Nasir

Same assignment, same lesson. Some things that I noticed in general for all 3 classes, was that their food pictures were awful. They all seemed to take pictures of small, round, questionable objects, or extremely wet objects. In both cases, they were either really blurry, or had a giant glare from the flash reflecting off of the surfaces. Or both. So while I didn't put up a ton of food pictures, in the classes we went over a lot of them so that they understood what they had to do to make those pictures better. Sunset pictures, can't wait....

All Rights Reserved by photographers, 2010, for all photos. Please contact info@fablab.af for individual rights.