Leopard Car

You gotta love this little car, which I spotted during my lunch break yesterday. People in London seem to love their animal-print cars. I've also seen a zebra car and another leopard car.

I'm back in photo class this week. Yesterday we talked photojournalism and went walking through Covent Garden and down by the Thames, shooting shadows and silhouettes. I got some nice shots, which you can see on Flickr (and probably here) over the next few days.

Dave and I went to see "Margin Call" on Sunday, and we really liked it -- which is a good thing, because the tickets cost an astonishing £17 apiece. (That's about $26 -- each.) We decided to try the Westfield cinema in Shepherd's Bush, which is within walking distance of our apartment. It's a very swanky cinema in a very swanky mall, and "Margin Call" was showing in an extra-swanky theater in the cineplex -- a theater, come to think of it, befitting a movie about the One Percent. I'm never going there again!

Two Weeks

I'm adjusting to life without Ernie and Ruby. It's been a little more than two weeks since we put them to sleep, and it already feels like much longer. The incessant self-questioning -- Did we do the right thing? Was it the right time? -- has mostly subsided. I've become much more comfortable that we did what was best for them and for us.

My photo classes have certainly helped, getting me out of the house and focusing (!) my mind elsewhere. It's also indisputable that our quality of life has improved, sad to say, without the dogs. The house is much cleaner and more pleasant, the laundry and other housekeeping is more manageable, and we have time to do things spontaneously like go to movies or out to dinner. Next month we're going to Amsterdam for five days.

And I am sleeping better than I've slept in months. Last night, for example, I went to bed at 10:30 p.m. and I didn't wake up until 7:30 this morning. That's an unheard-of amount of sound sleep for me, and it never would have happened with the dogs around.

Obviously, this isn't to say that I don't miss them. I miss them every day. But we've already reached a place where we can talk and laugh about them -- all their goofy shenanigans, especially when they were younger -- which feels much healthier. I even feel a little guilty about this healing process, like it betrays them somehow -- but a truer betrayal, I suppose, would be permanently attaching sorrow to years of happy dog memories.

I'm sure I still have more healing to go. It's early yet. But I do feel much better.

Dave and I went to see "The Iron Lady" with Meryl Streep yesterday. We both enjoyed it a lot, and Meryl, of course, gives an amazing performance. That woman is such a chameleon. She becomes her characters more thoroughly than any other actor I know.

(Photo: The Bridge of Aspiration at Covent Garden, on Thursday.)

Portraits

Yesterday we shot portraits in photo class. First we shot each other, which was no big deal. Then we had to go out and shoot strangers. Ugh!

My modus operandi in photogaphy is not interacting with my subjects. I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I just really don't want to talk to people I don't know. As my mother would say about herself, "I'm too odd and peculiar for that!"

Even as a reporter, my nightmare assignment was man-on-the-street interviews. I just hated the idea of interrupting someone who's going about their own business to ask them questions about politics or whatever.

Yesterday, we had three choices. We could a) photograph someone at work; b) photograph someone jumping into the air; or c) take candid portraits on the street, but they had to be good.

Option b was so far-out I considered it off the table. Option c was clearly my most likely choice, but I wanted to push my boundaries a little. So I found some poor newsagent who wasn't busy and photographed him in his shop.



I included all the cigarette packs behind him to give a sense of his workplace, but I wouldn't say it's a killer portrait. The light wasn't very remarkable. He was friendly but he had a lot of questions about who I was, what nationality I was, and where I lived -- and I can't blame him, since I'm sure it's not every day some strange middle-aged guy comes into his store and wants to take his picture.

I then wandered around and took lots of photos that are more representative of my style -- less in-your-face, like the top photo.

And with that, the first week of photography class comes to an end. Next week is going to be far more challenging -- it's street photography and photojournalism, which will mean more storytelling and more interaction. Ugh!

White Balance

Here's another cool trick I learned in my photo class. The camera uses a function called "white balance" to determine the settings for all its colors. It's usually automatic, and more or less accurate, but you can fool the camera to produce dramatically colored photos.

In this case, I went around pointing the camera at different colors -- red, blue, green and purple -- and told the camera each one was really white. After each reset, I took a photo of a tree in front of the building where my classes are held. Pretty cool, huh?

I'm sure I won't use this trick much, but it's cool to learn how white balance works. There are situations where you'd really want to reset the white balance, if your camera isn't doing it automatically -- for example, in a room lit by fluorescent light, which registers slightly green on the color scale. Otherwise the color on your photos will be distorted by weird lighting.

Today is the last day of my class, but I signed up for another more advanced class next week, focusing on photojournalism and street photography. Should be fun!

Pigeons

"Here I am, just an average tourist, feeding bread to pigeons in Kensington Gardens. Isn't this fun?"


"Look how the pigeon flies to my hand!"


"Oh my, here come some more! Good thing I have lots of bread."


"Wow, this pigeon won't even give me a chance to drop the bread. He's a little aggressive."


"GET THEM OFF ME!"

Chinatown and Carnaby

Yes, that is my hand.

Yesterday in photo class we learned more about exposure times and techniques like panning, which means following a moving object with your lens so the object is in focus while the background is blurry. The teacher had us hold our cameras on our shoulders and spin around while focused on our outstretched hands. I thought that was a pretty clever way to show how panning works.


We also experimented with spinning the camera itself while snapping a photo, which produces this effect.


And isn't this cool? If you use a long exposure in a dark room and someone sets off a flash a few times in front of their face -- in this case, my teacher -- this ghostly effect is the result.

We studied other things too, like how changes in the aperture (or F-stop) affect the depth of field. Again, some of this stuff I already know, but experimenting with it is always helpful. It's surprising how lazy you get just shooting everything on automatic. You forget what your camera can do.


In the late afternoon our class took a walk over to Chinatown, where we broke up and spent an hour or so shooting. I like this shot, with its bright colors and relatively shallow depth of field (blurry foreground and background).


And on the way home, I stopped on Carnaby Street -- scene of the swinging '60s fashion scene in London and home of the miniskirt -- and took some shots at night with longer exposures.

I'm having a lot of fun with this class. Today is a homework day -- I have a few assignments, but I'm also planning to just go out and wander a bit.

Blue in Focus

My photography class kicked off yesterday, and so far it's really interesting! I've already learned a lot about my camera -- how to control shutter speeds, F-stops and the ISO, for example. For years I've been shooting in automatic mode, relying on the camera to set all those factors for me. Usually it works really well. But there are times when I might want to take control, and now I'll know how.

I'm not totally green -- I know from working with film cameras what shutter speeds and F-stops are, for example -- but I didn't know which dials and buttons on my digital camera control and meter them.

The guy teaching the course is a photojournalist who worked for Agence France Presse, or AFP. He seems very knowledgeable and he's a good teacher. In between classroom lectures and demonstrations we are periodically sent out onto Oxford Street, the main shopping drag in the heart of West London, to practice our skills.



These photos are the result of a 10-minute assignment on focusing. We were supposed to choose a color -- in my case, blue. Then we shot photos experimenting with focus points, or those little squares that you see inside the viewfinder of your camera, incorporating items of our chosen color into each picture.



That's why part of these images is focused -- usually the blue object -- and part isn't.

Fascinating, I know.