Grr.

If your minimum standards for the behaviour of children don't include:

- Following basic laboratory safety rules
- Not talking while the teacher is talking
- Not talking during a video
- Following the SCHOOL RULES like not chewing gum

and if you don't follow through with consequences once you've threatened them, then you shouldn't be a teacher!!!!!!!

Time for a break

I'm very tired and feeling uninspired. I'll be back posting for term 3, so 18th of July.

Getting to Know You

I posted last week about getting to know my new camera and getting used to all the wacky newness of having a Digital/SLR hybrid. I thought maybe I should give you some examples of the sorts of things I'm getting out of it:

This is the first photo I ever took with the new camera. It is underexposed, blurry, and kind of... Well, brown. I was horrified at it, but fortunately I know that adjusting settings is all that's really needed.

This is a picture of a flower. No, really. If you look really hard and squint a little, you can almost see it. This was taken in the shade, late afternoon, and with too short an exposure.

This is another flower in the same patch of grass, this time with a longer exposure. I still wasn't entirely happy with it, though. It was too dark and way too blue.

This is that same flower, with a fair amount of photoshopping. I brightened it up, changed the contrast, altered the hue of the picture, then I took the colour out of the flower because I couldn't figure out any other way of making it less blue.

So you can see why my first challenge is just getting to know the device. I think I've made reasonable progress as far as this goes, but I have a fair way to go. I realise that very few photos out there come out perfect the first time and that most have at least some post-production work done on them, so I won't beat myself up about that flower not coming out so nicely the first time. But that kind of result without using photoshop is what I'll continue to aim for :-)

Lust

One of the problems with ADHD is that it is partly the result of a faulty reward system. This is overly simplistic as the characteristic lack of dopamine affects many areas of brain function and learning, but it may be related to risk-taking behaviour and addiction in those with ADHD.

Treatment for it through stimulant medications decreases the chances that someone with ADHD will attempt to self-medicate through other means, such as drugs or hoon driving or eating the mouldiest cheese they can find.

Of course, if it goes unmedicated, the poor ADD-er will start looking for other ways to get this "high" that we are so lacking.

One of the things that ADD-ers are known for is intense, short bursts of obsession over a new hobby, be it photography, stamp-collecting, or a movie they just saw. The symptoms are a lot like the early stages of falling in love. Consider please:

- You can't think about anything else
- It's all you talk about
- You get pictures of the of the object of your affection and put them EVERWHERE
- You find out as much as you can about the object of your affection
- You feel excited at the thought of doing something with the object of your affection

Of course, just like in love, after a few weeks your obsession dies down a little. That adrenaline rush you used to get just isn't as intense any more, and other thoughts are able to make it into your brain for more than half a second. This is where it either becomes True Love where the relationship grows into something and nurtures both of you, or fades into the distance to be replace by something that is as thrilling and exciting as the previous one was at the very start.

And so, the obsession cycle goes in ADHD, and it is all about seeking that next high.

A personal challenge

My housemate and I are involved in a mutual challenge. Every week, we try to cook a recipe we've never done before. It's pretty good because it's helped to reinvogorate my interest in cooking, and I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to do something like that with photography, now that I have my new DSLR. There are, however, a few modifications I would make:

Firstly, I think that it should be fortnightly or monthly. The recipe challenge can be weekly because I can afford to just pick a night of the week when I have a few hours free and spend maybe 10mins choosing a recipe before I go cooking. With photography, I need to give myself enough time to factor in changes in my workload, other scheduling and weather. So I think I'll make it monthly, and put up a few photos I'm particularly proud of for that month.

Secondly, I've realised that my first challenge has already started: getting to know the camera. So this month, I'm learning about how the camera handles light. My goal is to be able to consistently get photos where it's clear what the subject is. I need to learn how to balance the shutter speed, ISO, and the F-stop (how open the shutter starts off being).

It's not as easy as it sounds, mainly because a DSLR is a bizarre mix of the SLR film cameras I once used and the point-and-shoot cameras I've recently become used to. For instance, on this DSLR I can't see how the photo's turned out until I've taken it. I don't have to wait for it to be on the computer, but what I see through the view finder isn't exactly what I end up with.

With the SLR camera I once had, I'm used to controlling the shutter opening by rotating part of the lens casing and I can't do that here. I also have to push a button to see roughly how much light is getting in at that diameter. Of course, that won't tell me how the shutter speed will affect the image.

I'm also really not used to ISO, and I don't really want to use it if it can be avoided because it results in photos becoming noisy.  This means I have to focuse mostly on the other two, and on using the flash.

Hopefully I'll have fewer shocks when I go into Playback mode, like today when I went to look at my shots and saw nothing but black...