shutter speed

tonight was my second photo class. we met by the pig at the Market and spent the evening doing
hands-on shutter speed exercises. fun stuff - making waving arms disappear, stopping water mid-flow, panning to get a sharp moving object in the foreground and blur in the background.

my key takeaway from tonight was this: (per my teacher) the amount of information we have to absorb in the first few classes is overwhelming by design. we shouldn't really expect to feel competent about exposure until class six. and the shots we're taking now shouldn't be as good as ones we were taking before when we used auto settings because the camera on auto makes good choices and we don't know what the hell we're doing yet.

while ostensibly concentrating on shutter speed, i also absorbed more about choosing ISO and how to read histograms. i still don't feel the 18% gray thing in my bones, but tonight i feel more confident that it will make sense soon. also, i got more info about next week's critique: there's nothing wrong with choosing a favorite photo that is not my most technically proficient photo, because one of the things i will get out of the critique is what changes i need to make it a more ideal shot (and if i can correct that on the computer or if i need to recreate the shot with better settings).

so now i get to have more joy and less fear. i must fail in front of people in order to improve. it's going to be okay.

[30 days of books] remember meme?

i didn't intend to let this slide.

22. Your "comfort" book
Discussed in question 13, rereads. The Blue Sword, moving on.

23. Favourite book cover including a picture!
This is tough. Part of me wishes that books not have representative cover art. Covers are a marketing tool, and often they misrepresent characters or even act as spoilers. (my favorite example of this is the cover for the very fine Transformation by Carol Berg.) i love the first edition dust jacket for The Hobbit because it emphasizes the big journey and the dragon is so tiny and subtle. i think though, that this is my favorite:



while i'm not crazy about the text treatment, the art captures the setting of the book and the nature of the protagonists. i love the angles and the contrast of the ice with the dark sky. you can read so much into the image before and after reading the book. are there tears on those faces? strong or weak? serene or trapped?

my current favorite book art direction has to be Boneshaker. really great marriage of text and image, and as kylecassidy says, it's so Steampunk the text is brown. (really. my copy is printed in dark brown ink. it's subtle, but a great effect that is still easy on the eyes.)

24. Favourite fictional relationship (romantic, friendship, familial)
oof. let's do all three.

romantic: i can't quite answer this one. so often in genre books romance is a thing we do not get into because it is covered in girl cooties. the truth is that everyone has a soft spot for a love interest as long as it doesn't feel pasted on and stays true to the characters. (most hated romantic relationship, Bean/Petra in the second set of Ender books. Card has a lot of issues anyway, but damn. making Petra rabid about bearing superbabies? really? i stopped reading right there.) i have a hard time separating the relationship itself from "these two people i like". and often my favorite couples will drop into the background as soon as they're happily together, because seemingly writing stories about people who are happily together is extra-hard. that issue is discussed very well here.

friendship: the easy answer is Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. they grow and change together, live through good times and bad, have misunderstandings and annoyances, and make up when they argue. it's good, and (as much as fans might want it to be) it's not slashy. we just don't have very many good models of men being good friends to one another these days. the less easy answer is Mac and Brymn - introvert marine biologist and extrovert alien archeologist in a complex situation...i love their relationship and the contrast through the series of Mac's friendship with Brymn and with her human colleague Emily.

familial: the Vorkosigans. i don't know where to start or stop - there are multiple generations now, there are different parenting styles and generational thinking represented, there are great parents, awkward children, chips on shoulders, rakish cousins...it's as slopplily complex as a real family, complete with occasional blurring of lines between friends/family/business. i like them so much that i'll forgive Bujold for the bug butter.

30 questions

butterfingers

today i attached the binding to a small quilting project. it's the first sewing i've done since April, when i finally stopped trying to make things because i made so many errors on every project i touched. 2011 has just not been good for quilting, and since i have two quilts that were meant to be done in December still in pieces, it gets me down. i spent a lot of time before i went to PA not able to concentrate enough to read and not able to write about how i felt and not able to quilt without ruining whatever i touched.

it's just a potholder, i still have to hand finish the rest. but the corner miters are all aligned and there's nothing misshapen about the join between the two ends of the binding (a bugaboo of mine evident in the last thing i did in April - i gave up and gave it to the intended recipient anyway).

i have another creative thing i can do when my buffer is full of photography info and i need time to process.

whew.