Digital Camera Class 8: Term 3

Tonight we were very lucky enough to be allowed entry to the Welsh Hawking Centre after hours, for our Digital Photography Class.  The Welsh Hawking Centre is a hawking centre on Weycock Road on the northwestern outskirts of Barry, Vale of Glamorgan. It contains the largest collection of birds of prey in Wales, with over 200 birds on site including eagles, owls, hawks, falcons and buzzards.

They allowed us to see the birds in their huts, and several of them were put on display in the grounds for us. We were able to take some close up shots of the birds and then walk around the centre looking at all the other exhibits. The grounds are beautifully kept and well looked after, and there is a huge variety of birds to see. Several types of falcons, owls, vultures, geese, the list goes on.

We spent a good hour and a half walking around the centre, and took loads of photographs. I took about 200 myself!  To see the whole gallery of photographs that I took last night, click here!  I must remember to send a set of the pictures to the centre, to thank them for their kindness. 

Next week we are back in the computer room, where we will compare our photographs and see what everyone has taken!

The above video clip is of a European Eagle Owl having a drink, and refreshing himself in the water bowl he is stood in!

Jasper is a Scarlet and Blue/Gold Hybrid Macaw.

PC Maintenance Class 7: Term 3

Tonight’s class was one of our surgery sessions. I had two computer’s booked in for overhauls. Veteran student of the group, Roger, had problems with the performance of his computer, and the second machine was an RM All-In-One PC that I had borrowed and brought in, that needed wiping!

Roger’s computer, a Dell Dimension 9110, pictured above, had issues when it booted up.  After running MSConfig and tweaking a few of the options, stopping some non-essential services, clearing some of the Internet options, and resetting some defaults, the computer seemed to be ok.  Roger’s computer also had a problem with the card reader on the front of it – it wouldn’t read cards! By going into the Device Manager, and removing the card-reader drives, then allowing the computer to redetect and reinstall, the device worked. We then proceeded to test the device by looking at Roger’s holiday photographs of his recent visit to Italy – very nice too!

The second computer, an RM All-In-One, which as the name suggests, is a computer where its a complete unit, with everything built in. You simply plug a keyboard and mouse into it. This one, a five year old model needed rebuilding, as over time it had gotten quite slow!

In recent years, bundled recovery CD-ROMs have become less common, as some computer manufacturers  are now utilising hard drive partitions to store the recovery data. Accessing hard drive based system recovery is usually performed by pressing a specific key combination during or after the computer's start up. Partition based recovery systems are usually faster than their disc based counterparts since the data is directly on the hard drive and no disc swapping is needed. They can also be cheaper for the manufacturer because they do not need to ship recovery CDs with the computer, adding the price of creating them to the cost of the computer. 

After simply pressing “double Shift” at a specific time, which was the RM’s specific way of performing this task, I was able to quickly demonstrate how to restore the computer to it’s original factory shipped state. Fortunately also this particular computer had preinstalled software on it too, which was also apart o the recovery procedure. 10 mins later the computer was sorted – ready to run! Job done!!

Digital Camera Class 7: Term 3

Tonight’s class started off at the school in the classroom, with a presentation on Photo Composition.  I introduced the group into what are known as the “Six Rules of Photo Composition”.

They are as follows; Simplicity,  Symmetrical Balance, Asymmetrical Balance, Radial Balance, Rule of Thirds and Framing.  Click each one to get a definition.  Having looked at a few examples of each, I set a homework project where I wanted one example of each of the rules!   Download the slideshow from class by clicking here.  If you have problems opening the document, go to www.adobe.com and install Acrobat Reader.

For the second half of the class, we drove down to The Knap where along the way, Mandy bought a loaf of bread, and we planned to take pictures of the seagulls against a sunset sky. The sunset wasn’t that fantastic, but the birds went crazy for the bread!

I didn’t take very many pictures myself, I was nominated to throw the bread (and I ate a few slices too)…it was all very reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film “The Birds”!   Talking of which, next week’s class will be at the Welsh Hawking Centre, where they have promised to put on a show, just for us. Check back next week to see how it went!

A Blog in a Blog – Website Update!

After having put lots of thought into it, and taking the advice of many, the best thing to do was to completely strip out the old long winded Nightclass Resouces section of the website, and replace it with a simple Nightclass Information page. The new page just simply has the information about the three classes in the new Academic Year, when the classes are run, the dates, and a brief description.  Coming soon will be a full detailed course outline which will simply be added as a link to that page, and notification of that update will be posted here.

 

Previously the system was complicated for many, you had to create an account, then you had access to separate Digital Camera and PC Maintenance pages, where there was an account of what we did, and then there was a ‘downloads’ section to get class related work and various online resources.  Now those resources will be apart of the this Blog.  When I write up the weekly entries of classes, not only will they be of use to those that missed the class, but also I can tag in resources, or related materials to the blog entry. Keeping everything neater and in one place. 

 

For example, in the Digital Camera class we might spend an evening using the ‘Clone Tool’ in Paint Shop Pro, and I can now in addition to the summary of the class, but add a link so that the students can download notes on the subject, or sample exercise files that we used in class.

A special thanks to the following people for their advice by email: to James Marshall for still not convincing me about Twitter, but good advice on some other technical details, Rachel Armitage for proof reading some of the sections, and hopefully some others that she doesn’t yet know about, and telling me to keep it simple!  Yves Spierts for his advice on the choice of colour and design aspect of parts of the site, and best of all to Mike Wolfe for his bit of advice “My advice is that if it's a night class, make sure u have the lights on so people can read notes and see the keyboard!”

Hopefully this will make things a lot easier.