When Mother Goes On Strike!
TIME YOURSELF: you have 30 minutes to make 100 photos! Don’t think too much. This isn’t about quality, it’s about quantity. Stop after 30 minutes.
OCA Foundations in Photography Course Folder, pg26
I have titled my photo shoot, ‘When Mother Goes On Strike!’ This is because I have chosen to shoot the 100 photographs inside the house, in fact one room in particular, the kitchen. This is very rare for me because I always carry my camera around with me and shoot outside. The subject matter was the horrendous amount of washing up that my girls had left just laying around and in the sink. I actually went on strike and only washed my own things up for three days and what I was left with is seen in the photographs.
Having managed to sort out all of my camera settings apart from the f-stops I decided to go for gold. However, an epic learning curve awaited me.
I decided to use each lens that I had, so that I could compare them within this task. This experiment would mean that not only was I getting to grips with my cameras manual settings, but I would learn about the lenses and how they compared to each other on the same settings.
I didn’t even get past the first lens when I saw that my photographs were all totally bleached out. Fear started to erupt due to the fact that I have never had bleached out, pure white light photographs in my forty years of using a camera. My first reaction was that of shock, then dread, followed by that good old anxiety voice saying, “I think I shouldn’t have enrolled on this course!”
I decided to play with my new found camera controls until I obtained an OKish result in the images. I reminded myself that this was not about quality but quantity. I cringed.
To be honest, with all the messing around of changing lenses and looking at the shots and altering the settings now and again, I went over my thirty minutes, not by much, but I still went over the time limit.
EXERCISE 1:1 Uploading, organising and reviewing your photographs.
OCA Foundations in Photography Course Folder pg26
The next exercise saw me beginning to get to grips with Adobe Bridge which I found out is a file browser. This means that it does not open, edit or convert anything. Bridge actually hands the files to the appropriate applications for example, Photoshop, Camera RAW, Acrobat, Illustrator and to my amazement even MS Word.
I did not have quite a good start to this exercise due to the fact that I managed to forget to convert my photographs from RAW to DNG when they were being uploaded into Adobe bridge. This meant that I had to read through relevant sections of the book, Adobe Photoshop CC for Photographers and also read help pages on the internet until I figured out what to do (Research – Exercise 1:1).
Once the first hurdle was crossed, I was able to work through the remaining tasks with ease. In fact I learnt quite a lot and was very pleased with the amount of information I had gained. Even working through my mistakes moved me forwards in my knowledge and new skill learning.
EXERCISE 1:1 Upload your final selection to your learning log as small thumbnails.
OCA Foundations in Photography Course Folder pg28
I was not sure how many photographs should be in my final selection especially as I am not over enthusiastic with my end results, however perfection was not the name of the shoot here, so I decided to upload an even six photographs onto the page.
Before I could upload the photographs, I needed to work out the meaning of thumbnails in the context of my page, so I had searched for previous students blogs to find out how they had presented the photographs as thumbnails. I also found out that I had to save my chosen photographs as a JPEG file for the internet as I found that Worpress was not recognising the RAW or DNG files for upload.
Final Selection of Photographs
Well, I managed to save the photographs as JPEGs with ease but I have researched and researched and cannot for the life of me work out how to upload the final six images as small thumbnails. I have either missed something on the settings page or ‘thumbnail’ is used as an interchangeable term with the gallery styles, which I doubt very much…
I AM EVER SO FRUSTRATED AND ANNOYED!! I researched on the internet and watched some YouTube videos on thumbnails and WordPress, but each explanation had a different design menu to mine? I am really annoyed with this and will have to continue researching. Am I supposed to make the thumbnails in photoshop somehow or within WordPress?
dawntomlinphoto.wordpress.com 
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