Posting Pictures Again

Yay! I’m back to posting pictures to the photoblog and to flickr. That is all. Carry on.

Photo Class

So, I was poking around on bluebanana today, and I saw this photography class mentioned. 8 weeks long – they run 3 semesters a year. I’m really into the idea of taking a class or doing a seminar, partly to get me out the funk of the same old things (or not even taking pictures, as it’s silly hot here) but the only other class I’ve seen was at Mall Of The Emirates, and it was an intro/beginners class.

I’ll check it out and post again if it seems to be interesting.

The Reason Why I Started Gurucollege

Ira Glass, from This American Life, talks about working on becoming a professional, and keeping at what you do for years until you’ve learned to do it well.

This, really, is why I started this blog – primarily the photo portion of it. I have no dreams of being a professional blogger or writer – that’s not me – but I do want to hone my skills as a photographer. I realized once I got my first DSLR that I was going to need to go through a few thousand frames before I really got past being a vacation-snapshot photographer and got more into the photojournalist or fine art photographer category. Yes, I know. A few thousand. Foolish. I’m maybe 1/2 way there, in my personal estimate, and I’ve got well over 14,000 images in my Aperture library. We’re now talking about tens of thousands of images before I get where I want to be.

In other news, looking back, I have come a long way. I started this blog (for the picture of the day part) on April 17, 2005 and I must say, it’s been a long trip. I hope everyone else can see the improvement that I can see in the quality of the pictures I’m taking.

I think the next thing I need to master is off camera flash.

Dubai Photography Classes

• Gulf Photo Plus hosts weekend photography classes in the Mall of the Emirates – but it’s all beginner stuff (ISO, white balance, etc).

So far, that is the only class I’ve been able to find, other than enrolling in a university photography class. I currently work at a university, and the kinds of photography classes I want to take have a pretty hefty list of pre-requisites. I’ll have to find who is teaching the classes and see if I can sit in.

Weekend Updates

Over the weekend, we went to the Sharjah Aquarium and out to the new souk at Wafi. Got some pics up on flickr finally. All the shots are direct from the camera (processed to JPEG via Aperture’s RAW converter). Some of them will wind up on the gurucollege.net/pix site at some point in the near future. I’m trying to find some kind of photography class in Dubai or Sharjah, as I’d like to sharpen my skills somewhat, but I’m not really motivated when it’s this hot. I need to just bite the bullet and do it, right?

Additionally, the Seagate drive is back from warranty work, and reinstalled into the array in my personal file server, bringing it up to 2.7 terabytes of useable space – with a redundant drive. This way, I can afford to have a single drive die on me, and have time to replace it, before I start to lose data. Once I go whole-hog (in a year or two) and finish/upgrade the file server, my plan is to have 2 vdevs of 5 devices each, and an extra drive as a spare. I’m not sure how I want to handle the spare – having it as a hot spare and running in the case, or having it “cold” and sitting on a shelf waiting for need. Regardless, I’m going to need a better solution for mounting the drives in the case, and I need to find some kind of hot-swappable drive sled that’s happy with Solaris. Fun fun.

I guess the next project I’m working on is iSCSI exports from my fileserver to my desktop for Aperture Vaults – as Aperture won’t vault to a network drive.