Total Hours: 8.5
Perpich, Rebecca Bullen, 5 hours
This week at Perpich, the darkroom class was cut short due to an all-school meeting in their auditorium. Since this class is only around 50 minutes long normally, it was cut short to only a half hour.
Because of this, Rebecca had me help Evan, her student TA, with installing two photo pieces and a video installation for their upcoming exhibition. We had to act fast since the show’s reception was happening that night. Evan and I worked on getting the videos looping on the computer, but by the time we finished that he had to leave to attend the all school meeting.
When he left, I finished installing the photo pieces—I had the last minute help of Josh Olson, my friend and Perpich Media Center manager!
After that, I headed to the narrative class with Rebecca. We discussed screenwriting and Rebecca had the students write a short abstract on their screenplays to briefly explain the theme and plot. After each student read theirs aloud, the we commented on their ideas and discussed whether or not they were reasonably shootable with their resources. We also talked about the cast and crew that would be needed for each screenplay.
Rebecca went through all of the different crew positions students would need to fill for their projects like: director, producer, writer, editor, cinematographer, assistant camera, sound, food, hair and makeup, etc. We also talked about the responsibilities of each crew position, and how they might overlap on a small project.
Only a certain amount of students wanted to shoot the script they had written, so after we had a list of them, we asked the students to create a sign up system so that everyone could help each other with their projects and make sure all the positions were filled. It was around here that students worked among themselves and Rebecca and I were done for the day.
MCTC, Paul Sinkler, 3.5 Hours
This week in Paul’s class, we went over their recent assignments that were due, and then did a small demonstration in the photo editing software CaptureOne.
The first assignment that we went through was from one of the first exercises I helped with in my first week or so. This was the macro assignment. Students had to present macro photos from a number of different techniques—like using a standard macro lens, a non-macro lens with an extension tube, and flipping a standard lens backwards. Students had an excellent grasp on the assignment and I got to see some very gorgeous macro images. My favorite images were from one student who photographed a record player and a cribbage board!
The next assignment we went through was from when we, as a class, photographed a still like with three different cameras, then ran them through different image editing softwares to compare raw file processing from Lightroom and CaptureOne. We used the projector to compare everyone’s files.
Also, an assignment I wasn’t present for earlier on in the class, was the assignment where students got to use Lensbaby lenses. They are essentially inexpensive toy lenses that create tilts and shifts in focus for very soft ethereal images. Those were incredibly fun to see, since it was such an open-ended assignment that yields very interesting and unconventional photographs. There were some flower pictures from one student that were very beautiful.
Critique was done, and Paul shifted gears to show a few short video tutorials from Lynda.com on CaptureOne to introduce some of the features of the application to the class. After that, Paul went over simple functions of CaptureOne like importing images, and batch renaming files with added EXIF data, which is important in the artistic and commercial industry. These are things that can be done in Adobe Lightroom, but Paul goes over both programs as they have distinct advantages and disadvantages from each other.