Well, college has started.  Generally the course is on a Wednesday night from 5pm till 9pm (which is a long day when I start work at 8am).  To start with we had a Monday night (10th September) this was mainly signing paperwork, enrolling and setting up payment…!  We started properly on the Wednesday.  There are currently 14 of us in the group, ranging from around 20 to 50.  Everyone seems really friendly, although because we’re all a bit shy at the moment there are a few silences.  There are a couple of people that I have met on previous courses at the college so i’d got a couple of familiar faces to start with.  The lecturers are experienced photographers, have also done part time study and are very enthusiastic.

The first few weeks of the course is a sort of ‘back to basics’ to make sure everyone is at the same level.  It has been a little tedious but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to refresh your memory about things and possibly iron out any bad habits that I may have gotten in to.  Our first ‘homework’ was to go and shoot examples of fast and slow shutter speeds.  I was quite pleased with my efforts and the slow, zooming image got quite a lot of discussion in class, with someone mentioning they were going to try the effect.  I was also very impressed with the variety of images in the group.  One particular image got a lot of discussion.  Someone had tied some wire rope to a length of rope and then set light to it.  They had then asked their friend to swirl the rope around in a circle in front of them,  the sparks from the wire wool gave an amazing effect on a 9 second exposure.

My images are below:

Fast shutter:

(Fast Shutter) Austin running down the garden
100ISO, f7.1, 1/500s

(Slow shutter) Zooming into dog toy
100ISO, f29, 10s. Zoom-pause-zoom…

(Slow Shutter) Nodding dog
100ISO, f5, 1/3s