OCA Course: The Art of Photography – a few comments.

OCA Course: The Art of Photography. – a few comments.

On the whole, I found this module useful. The intention was to improve the "artistic" element in my wildlife photographs. Judging by the comments of onlookers, and by my own feelings, this has succeeded to a degree. I have a bigger proportion of images that I like, and remarks about the improvements in my photographs from others.

There are one or two issues with the course. The course manual has not been thoroughly "proof-read". Page 84 has disjointed continuity, page 129 poor narrative in relation to mains flash, page 150 has images completely missing (relating to pearls), and pages 139 and 140 were completely missing, so I don't know if there was an exercise relating to on-camera flash.

Numerous questions were asked outwith the actual exercises, but it was never made clear whether these should be formally answered in the learning log.

Some of the technical stuff is outdated – I've been looking at fluorescent lights as part of my work for the last 35 years, and they have all been daylight balanced, as are most domestic tubes now, so green tinges are a thing of the past. Some of the exercises were also a bit "techy", and probably unnecessary. I think the manual needs an overhaul.

Finally, the maintaining of a learning log as a Blog needs further clarification, in respect of recommended formats, and there should be a warning for those with slow internet connections that uploading large numbers of multi-megabyte images will take inordinate time, and often result in upload failures. Blogger has, however, improved recently, allowing better arrangement of layout and content.