Personal reflection: shiny new kit!

Last week I was laid off ill and I'm not too keen to reflect too much on that experience so instead let's look further back to our technical week.

First of all, I really enjoyed the different format. Learning in an intense session helps me remember things so much better and I'm sure it's more efficient since you cut down on the need to revise last week's lesson before you can continue.

I also enjoyed the fact we were using new kit; there's something childishly exciting about new toys to play with. And very fun toys they are: bigger better tripods (ie - more complex), a whole seperate matte box (which allows you to use filters and all that jazz) and a nifty little thing called a follow-focus, which lets you do smart focus pulls.

I think I picked up their care and feeding pretty quickly and the kind of things you can achieve with them is impressive. For instance, we did a little practice shoot racking focus between two subjects and it looked very smart, and we tried using polarising filters on a shot of the sky and the results were impressive.

As well as laying on more technical knowledge we got a lesson on framing. I liked that we got to go out and give it a try, excruciating as it was when your shot was analysed and found lacking. My framing wasn't bad, mostly, but my weakness was a reluctance to really operate the camera, to move with events as they happened. That's definitely something I can fix with practice and a bit of thought.

I'll just tack on that it's rather strange being a second year. The academy is full of tiny young things which I've never seen before and which look barely old enough to hold their heads up. Right now I'm in the library and I'm not sure whether there's a field trip from the local primary school in.