Exercise 1a: on a bus from Canberra to Sydney

I am realising that "attending" the course will be really hectic. But fun. Everytime I will be in a different place. It will be hard to work out the best way to do course assignments, in places where I just landed, totally unknown. But whilst not blessed with depth of knowledge, everythime I will have fresh eyes, and one more reason to look and engage deeper into what surrounds me.




A long ride back from canbrra to Sydney. I should be on a train, but it is not travelling, works in progress on the tracks. All the passengers (10) are easily put on a bus. Well... this could be an opportunity to break the ice and start my first assignment. The bus driver is quite a character: tatoos on his arms, no safety belt, lot of chatting on the radio with the colleagues. For sure he will not mind a passenger taking pictures of him. In fact, he does not. So I can start the first exercise. Not easy. I realised that I have been spoiled by the "P" function of my camera, so going back to fully manual is a nightmare. I cannot zoom in and out, ouch, this is such a pain... am I really supposed to MOVE instead of zooming??? After tons and tons of pictures taken in P mode, occasionaly adjusting the exposure and little more, the camera just felt a little clever interface bentween myself and the world. But this is because I let her to do what she wanted, more or less. Now the Nikon is in my grip but, in M mode, it is also suddently become a dumb black box, that needs my full attention. And I am always too slow, too late, or simply I am putting all my energy on changing - in a clumpsy way - settings on the camera... so there is no chance to make any decent picture! And the light changes all time time, because of the clouds and of the road turns. I am tempted to cheat at least a bit, using A or S mode...

I cannot move much whilst the bus travels, this driver is cool but there is a limit to the extent I can jump around to avoid traumatising other passengers. And as in the fable of the the fox and the grapes, I imagine that all the pictures I cannot take would be the best shots. For example, bottom up, driver in 3/4, close up on the tatoos on his arm, eyes looking down as he talks on the radio, australian sky in the background). But at the end of the day even the one I can take - from above, with some landscape and eucalipts on the top and maybe a car on the road - do not quite look as I figured them.

But it is a healty frustration the one I feel. I understand that at the end of the day it is not so important to make a great picture. What matters is to reconnect with the camera, in a different way, and learning to take some control if it. I do not know if this attempt will be good enough to become part of exercise 1. Probably not, I better think of an additional one to make up for this... But I have a sense of why it matters.