Working practice

One of the challenges of studying I’ve found is marshalling all the thoughts and materials into a coherent mass – especially as I spend 2-3 days  every week away from home – and the time I spend in hotels is therefore a large chunk of my “free” time. What I have also found pretty frustrating is trying to capture the random thoughts that occur while I’m driving – and the thoughts spurred by listening to people on the radio – as there’s a limit to my memory capability when it comes to this sort of stuff (bad jokes is another issue – but I digress).

So what are the basics – I have the notes in a ring binder, an A5 notebook as provided at the start of the course and this blog. A few pros and cons to start with.

• the course notes – in previous courses I’ve tended to scribble thoughts on them – which is a bit unsatisfactory at assessment time. I started off by carrying them with me but they are big, bulky and made of paper so easily damaged. In the end I copied the contents pages onto my phone and went with just that unless I really needed to take a page or two with me.
• the A5 notebook – I can see looking at the example videos provided by the OCA that my previous notebooks would have provided rather slim pickings for an assessor. I’ve tried harder this time – I’ve used it to keep notes of study visits, scribble down thoughts about photographers I’ve researched in books and collect my random musings. I’ve discovered that I tend to progress by simply asking myself questions – which I try to write down – the answers get ground around in my head and end up as posts here. Sometimes using the notebook can be quite spontaneous – at others it just feels forced. As time as progressed I’ve also felt restricted by the size and binding. For my next course I’ve moved up to an A4 notebook, with built in document wallets so that I can more easily add pictures and supplement notes as I go.
• this blog – is here when I need it – on my lap-top in hotels, on my phone when I’m out and about and on my home PC when I’m not. Sometimes I post finished thoughts (in as far as any thought is finished) – sometimes musings  - whatever feels comfortable  - which in truth is most things other than the random questions and jottings in my notebook. I post my photos on Flickr for linking here. For better or worse I started my OCA journey using Blogger – it’s pretty easy to use – and although the OCA model is based on Wordpress I feel no significant reason to change. What I have done throughout this course is tweak the layout to more closely resemble the OCA model – so that the assessors and, hopefully, other people can find their way around better.

What more do I need? Quite a bit actually. I find the idea of doing online research and then painfully transcribing links to a written notebook odd at best. Ditto finding images and articles online and then printing them out. Carrying an A5 notebook everywhere is simply painful – and A4 will be worse – as I don’t wear a jacket or carry a man-bag. I’ve taken the reading list seriously on this course as well – not something I did before (we live and learn), but there is a limit to how big a library I can transport. So during the course I’ve adopted a couple of practices and bits of technology to help manage this.

• One Note – I’ve blogged about this previously. It’s my go-to tool for online research – the challenge now is how to present the info at assessment without more dead trees. I use it to collect articles, links and images of interest. I use it to store my tutor reports and e-mails between myself and my tutor, and to collect my initial reactions to tutor feedback. I shall be using it to store any worthwhile forum posts I make for future reference. It also integrates with my phone – so I use it to store stuff I might need while way on study visits – train times, proof of ticket purchase etc.
• my phone – I am embarrassed to admit that in a forum response to Joe Fox I once suggested that if the answer was a smart phone you were asking the wrong question. I now use it for staying in touch with the forums when I’m on the move, as a handy camera for recce trips and visual note-taking, it has tide tables, a depth of field calculator and a sun compass –and best of all a handy little free text note taking app (S-Note) you can write on with a stylus. From time to time I export these to the PC, print them off and add them to my log-book. By the time I’ve thrown in Dropbox and the One Note app I can do pretty much anything in the field I could do at my desk (although I do prefer working on the PC/laptop for the proper keyboard.) I also have a mind-mapping app which I've just started using to keep notes from books I’m reading – not quite sure about it yet, but worth a try I think. And finally there’s the Bloglovin app which i use to stay in touch with other blogs I fiollow.
• my Kindle – much easier to read on than a computer or a phone I try to get as many of the course texts as possible in this format. I also use it for pdf texts from the net, and as a handy format for instruction manuals. The dictionary function is also pretty handy when reading some of the denser theory texts. I have the Kindle app on my phone and both computers so I can generally get a decent view of colour images if I feel I need them as well.
• forums – Flickr and OCA.; My contribution to these varies – sometimes I’m very active, sometimes I’m just an observer, There seem to be several ways of interacting with these  - my preferred methods are contributions to debates and helping relative newcomers. the latter has the unexpected benefit of testing my own understanding as well.

I guess it’s possible to say technology has taken over my life but it feels about right to me. Information gathering is done with the phone, Kindle, forums and PCs and recorded using the logbook, S-Note and OneNote. Musings and thought sorting are done in the logbook and sometimes her and on the forums and the final (and sometimes semi-final) output recorded here.

Not sure if all this is helpful to anyone but me, but I’ve not really thought about the physical structure of my learning experience before. Overall it feels comfortable – although I’m sure I will continue to tweak it as I progress.

PS Did I mention I sometimes make photos?

Damn!

I guess it had to happen eventually – I’ve dropped one of my cameras on an unyielding surface :( Fortunately – in monetary terms – it’s my E-P1. Not sure how serious the damage is as I had to go to work, but the battery door is definitely a goner – am keeping my fingers crossed that it’s no worse than that, otherwise e-bay will be my friend I think.

The only real pain is that it’s the camera I’ve been using for my field panoramas, so I’ll now have to see how well I can reproduce them with the E-3. Hopefully reasonably well.

Contrast and Exposure – an excuse to use my new gizmo

Acquired a near perfect Weston Euromaster V on e-bay the week before last. It’s a wonderful little device with dials and buttons – no digits required apart from my fingers – it doesn’t even need a battery as the selenium cell that measures the light also produces the current needed to make the needle move. Not sure quite how often I’ll use it, but it seemed like a handy thing to have available.

Have just give it its first proper outing in Project 12 which requires me to measure the light in various parts of a scene. I chose this one as the sky on the left was still quite bright and there was a fairly bright highlight on the garage wall and the bottom left of the garage door was in fairly deep shade. I make no claims for it as an image  - other than it fits the requirement of the Project.

First up the beginners error. I did what the exercise asked – took a reading from the garage highlight (1/60 sec at f22) and from the base of the garage door (2.5 secs) – and then I took a shot with the average exposure (a bit over 1 sec) rather than with the mid-point on the basis that half of (2.5+1/60) was about 1.3 secs. Idiot – I should have course have chosen the stop half way between 1/60 and 2.5 secs – around 1/4-1/6 of a sec – which would have given me a much better exposure – as it was it was off by a mile. Note to self – engage brain before following instructions.

The incident light reading which I took in the patch of sunlight gave a much better exposure (1/4 sec) and using the ‘O’ setting on the light meter as per the instructions gave a similar exposure (this setting lets you measure a highlight and calculates the exposure accordingly) although in both cases the bright patch of sky was burned out beyond reasonable recovery.

Once I’d realised my error I repeated the original approach – this time averaging the meter readings rather than the shutter speeds and got a similar result to the camera on auto – which is reassuring. However – in all these cases I was still losing the highlights in the sky so I tried a final attempt with the highlight metering function and the meter aimed at the brightest part of the sky. This gave me an exposure which allowed me to recover the small burned out area that remained. The foreground was quite dark, but was recoverable in Lightroom to give the result above.

This latter part strays into the second half of the project which looks at dealing with the contrast after the exposure.

I’m not sure I understand the point of the parts of the project that ask me to compare a black and white conversion with the coloured version. I know (although I’ve never tried it) that black and white film has more latitude for contrast than colour film – but in the case of the digital image both were taken from the same sensor. I found the shadows could be recovered on both without too much issue. Even in the coloured version it is possible to tweak the colour sliders to lighten areas such as the grass selectively.

Conclusions

On a digital sensor black and white is essentially no more flexible in contrast terms than colour – but whichever route you take you get a better result if the exposure is within the range of the sensor, and you’ve got the highlights under control.