Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Today started out with breakfast at 7:45, and we headed to a very quaint little restaurant filled with wonderful smelling breakfast sandwiches. After our five dollar breakfast, we all headed back to the hotel conference room to start the morning's class. After a brief time of devotions on leadership and worship through singing, we dove headfirst into learning all we could about aperture settings. Then the instructors pushed us outside into our "speed shoot" of the day. We were allotted half an hour to capture two images, one with a large depth of field, and one with a small depth of field. We were allowed to take as many pictures as we needed, but we were only allowed to submit two photographs to the instructors for critique and review later.
After a refreshing time outside, we headed back to our "pool of information" to learn more about shutter speeds and how they correlate to our aperture settings. From there we split into two groups; one headed to lunch, and the second group stayed in the conference room for image review and critique. After about forty-five minutes, the groups switched. Once we were all fully satisfied, we met in the hotel lobby to head over to visit the Lincoln, World War II, Vietnam War and Korean War Memorials for a two hour photo shoot. The guidelines were these: we were only allowed forty-eight shots, no image playback review, and no deletion of any pictures.
The categories for shooting were "Green," "Wet," "Picture of the Day," and a few others that were based off of the knowledge we'd picked up this morning in class. After our rigorous and energetic walk back to the hotel we were told that we all had a half an hour break before dinner to do with as we pleased. The two of us decided to hit the souvenir shop and get some ice cream and much needed water and Gatorade. We then proceeded to head up to one of our rooms and soak our feet in a tub filled with cold water.
Once we got the tub halfway filled, we got the bright idea to sit on the edge of the tub wall and eat our ice cream there. While we were resting our tired feet from a long day's hike and chatting about the days events, one of us accidentally dropped a spoonful of ice cream into the tub of running water. That was all we needed to start a crazy laughing fit for both of us. :-) The laughter and the cold water were a very refreshing combination to complete a long day filled with lots of newly gained knowledge and lots of great shots from around the Washington, D.C. area.
—IPS Students Kristin Roy and Valerie Hepschmidt