Whew! It's been a bit of a week. Running, running. Not a lot of sitting. Not a lot of reading your lovely blogs. And still, it's been one of those weeks where, looking back, I'm not sure I can point you to much that I've managed to accomplish. Even dinner last night? Frustrating. The knob broke off our crock pot, and I thought I couldn't turn it off. Not a problem, right? All I need is "on." When it's time to be done with it, I can just unplug and go get a new crock pot (!). So I go to get the boys (my boy and our neighbors... don't freak out... there aren't extra boys) from school, and I come home to the house smelling lovely but a cold crock pot.

What the what? Apparently I could turn it off, and in fact, I did turn it off. So dinner was a bit of a scramble.

Anyhoo. Off to by a new crock pot today, AND it occurred to me that I haven't chatted much with you about my photography classes. I'm going to try and rectify that a bit. I'll say first that it's a little surreal to be teaching in the same space where you first started learning. Almost as if I'm not worthy. But you know what? I love it. I've been a teacher in various formats (all to adults) at different times of my life, and I love it. In this incarnation, I've worked with teens and adults, and in some ways, I've never been happier.

It's not easy. Learning photography was not an intuitive process for me (maths!), but now that I've been a photographer for a number of years, taking photographs has become an intuitive process. It's a rewarding challenge to take something that has become intuitive and give it language and turn around and teach it.

Learning how to shoot your camera on manual mode is hard. And at first, when your photos look so much worse than they did on auto, you wonder why the heck you ever started. With each class we layer our information, starting with the exposure triangle and learning the mechanics of the camera's functions. After that, we add in composition and controlling depth of field (getting that pretty blurry background), from there we start moving into light and controlling motion. There's so much! This past week, as you can see, we talked about portraits. We're half way done, and I still feel like there's so much more to cover.

My students are amazing. Each week they walk in bemoaning their frustrations like they're worried I'm handing out letter grades at the end of our six weeks together, but truthfully, we're all pretty easy on each other. I'm trying to teach them how to view photographs as much as how to take them, and my hope is that our class is a place where everyone is comfortable enough to say, "I have no idea how that happened," for good or for ill. I know I say it all the time.

Each session is different; heck, each week is different, and it's slowly becoming more and more a part of me. You'll likely see more class information pop up here on SPL now and again. And right now? I feel incredibly touched and humbled to be standing in front of the room where I once sat, so bewildered. That's pretty special to me.