Wallace's Wonderful Adventure: Photography Class

Peter approached me a few weeks ago about maybe taking a photography class. It was suppose to be in Beijing but I said no if that was the case. It is from 9-5 (with 4 hours driving time) and there was no way to get Cameron to and from school. Peter arranged for the teacher to come to TEDA. Great. Unfortunately it had to be on a weekend. I wasn't too excited about that but I became committed so I couldn't back out. There had to be 12 participants so if I didn't do it then no one could. 12 people: Me, Ileana, Cristina, Mette, Nadia, June, Peter, Thomas, Paolo, Anders, Michael, Morgan and instructor Mitchell Masilun.

Saturday mornings session was learning what all the buttons are on the camera and how each works. I had no idea about ISO, aperture, shutter speed, etc. At first I felt like he was speaking a foreign language. He wasn't since he is from Chicago. Every time he would talk about a function and tell us to find it on our cameras he would say "Does anyone need help?" Every time me and Ileana would raise our hands. It was pretty funny. We all went to Subway for lunch together and then back to class. The afternoon session was to take pictures using the different settings and functions we had learned in the morning. YIKES! By the afternoon I had already forgotten some of the things he taught. But once outside the teacher worked with us. Hands on approach is much easier to learn. It was fun shooting the different things but it was freezing out. The temperature dropped quickly and we were all frozen by the time we went back inside. 5:00 we went home.

Sunday we met at 9:15 at Young Whore (not spelled in Chinese) to take photos. It is a pretty big market with all kinds of different characters. We spent 2 hours taking photos. We had specific things we were suppose to take shots of and specific ways to do it. We found some Chinese do not like to have their picture taken and they told us so. Others were posing and yelling at us to take their picture. It was fun interacting with the locals. One shot I was taking was a group of 4 people playing the Chinese version of hacky sack. They were laughing and having fun. We were laughing with them. When we went to walk away the one man tapped me on the arm, moved his fingers together like give me money, and laughed. I looked at him and said "tai guile" (tie gwayla) which means too expensive. The entire group cracked up laughing. The market shooting was my favorite part of the workshop by far. We all went to lunch together again but this time at Jacky's.

Enjoying lunch at Jacky's.

Back to school for the afternoon session. This was painful. The teacher showed us how to use Lightroom to edit pictures. The problem was he was going so fast there was no way to understand what he was doing or how he was doing it. We then had over an hour to edit 4-6 of our favorite shots. Honestly I had no idea what I was doing. I always hit auto fix and called it a day. We then had to have them critiqued. He really liked my black and white one. He said he really wouldn't fix anything. Phew! I did something right. At 5:00 Ileana and I left. That is when class was suppose to be over and that is when our driver was there. The teacher asked if people could stay until 6:00. Sorry, we have to go. I was done and wanted to go home. Overall it was a good class. I did learn how to better use our big camera.

My pictures I turned in to be critiqued:

The portrait picture.

Capture the movement picture.

Cool. This man yelled at us to take his picture. When we asked him to turn the lighter on he said no.
It was like we crossed some line. It was hilarious.