Monday, April 26, 2010

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.

1 comment:

  1. Wow, what great photos! I really am intrigued by Hameed's photograph. The textures and that jolt of color show me that this photographer has a good eye!

    ReplyDelete