Irritated with blogger and encryption codes

After trying for several hours to upload text onto blogger and paragraph it properly and still have not succeeded. As my learning style suggests I am very meticulous and things like this stress me out. This again relates back to one of my targets and after persisting for a while it is official that I have given up trying to understand why when I type it will not format it properly.

Self reflection

I have never been the type of person who has masses of confidence, but find that I can express myself by using photography. After starting at Fisheye, I was very nervous about how premature my photographic skills were and felt that I had a heap of things to learn. Over a period of nine months, on the job training and some confidence building boosts from the head of photography I finally felt ready to study photography.

For the first five months of my on the job training I spent most of this time practising and perfecting shooting perfect pack shots of everything from fairy washing up liquid to jam and toilet rolls. Then one Monday morning, my boss told me that he was going to set me a creative brief and I had the scope to do what I wanted and be creative.

One of the hardest things I have battled with is allowing others to look at my work. Working within a team of 4 photographers it has helped me enormously with this. At first I was very shy as criticism can be cruel, but after several months you get used to the idea that everyone looks at pictures in different ways. What one person finds amazing, striking and eye catching another person may not even bat an eye lid at.

After overcoming this barrier, I have been able to discuss my work and therefore gain tips and ideas of how to improve and create different effects to create the perfect shot.

This I think has worked to my advantage as with being on this course I can apply them. Simple things such as adding reflectors with holes cut out and baffling light off can create some great effects and make images look more realistic and life like, rather than appearing as though they have been shot in a studio.

For the second week of my course, we were asked to bring in 5 of our favourite images and explain why they had been chosen. I decided to show two of my own pieces, for a couple of reasons. I feel that I have moved on enormously with my own confidence and can to show my work to a group of people and feel self assured that I have tried the best that I can. It also allowed me to receive feedback from fourteen people that I did not know very well and therefore gave me real criticism. I find that when people know you well, they tend to soften how they express if they do not like something so not to hurt feelings.

With this new found confidence in my creative ability I feel like I have accomplished a lot and come a long way from when I first started in this industry.

I hope that within the next few months this new found confidence will continue to generate and I will feel more at ease when doing things like presentations in front of the class.

New targets

After looking at my preferred learning style and assessing my strengths and weaknesses, I decided to sit down and set myself some targets on how to improve and therefore better myself.

With having 2 jobs and also being on a full time degree I do not have much free time to sit and relax, therefore I have a tendency to dismiss stress levels rather than dealing with them.

Within the next few months before the end of the academic year is over I want to try to combat this and take some time out of my day where I can sit and reflect and relax myself.

To do this I will take at least and hour out of everyday to visit a friend, pamper myself, watch television or just generally relax.
I have also been told that exercise is a good way to relieve underlying stress and so have decided that I am going to try and go swimming at least 2-3 times a week. I love water and find it very relaxing and so this should be a great activity for me. It will also help me sleep better as at the moment I find that I am up late at night working because I find it hard to sleep.

With having a very busy schedule outside of university, I to try to plan some time everyday to work on my modules outside of the lectures and seminars. This I feel is a good start, but I sometimes feel I am not making as much progress as I would like. In order to get the best use of time management, I need to try and plan this section of time a little better. By making more to lists of the things that are important and give myself an allotted time within that space in the day to try and complete certain tasks.

I also know that when studying for my first degree in Marketing and Pr I am not very good at coping with stress in exams, however still pass them. This is not something that I will have to face on this course, however we do have several individual presentations in front of the group which I am also not overly comfortable with. Although I am an outgoing person, when it comes to standing up in front of peers I do get nervous. Hopefully by setting time aside to sit and prepare and rehearse my presentation at an earlier date, I will be more assured of the content and be able to relax a little more on the day.

Assessing my strengths and weaknesses

Now that I know I do not have a specific learning style, but am aware that I favour the visual style, I can start to access and address my strengths and weaknesses. I did this using another self assessment questionnaire.

According to the analysis I am "Confident about the transition to higher study and are well prepared for the different kind of work and ways of dealing with it ahead of you."

The questionnaire had 10 main topics areas:

Understanding the challenge that lies ahead
Guiding you own learning
Writing and analysis
Presenting your ideas
Research and information processing
Coursework and longer projects
Using ICT effectively
Managing your time
Assertiveness
Coping with stress

All of these sections had a total score of 25. For all of the categories except coping with stress, I scored 21-25 which suggests that I am confident in the area and have most of the key skills.

Something which I am aware that I have am not good at is coping with stress and the test highlighted this. I gained a total of 18 marks in this category and this is something that I therefore need to try and improve on. In order to address this, I will need to set myself some targets.

My preferred learning style... I don't have one!!!

Eyes, ears and sense of touch play an important role in the way people communicate, see reality and relate to others. A person learns best and communicates best with people who have a similar learning style to that individual. Because of this, I thought that it was important to look at my learning style.

Today I sat down and tested myself to see if I was better at learning in a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic style. These modalities (sensory channels) all have different characteristics.

I answered a series of questions from a learning styles checklist rating a number of sentences with a number from 1-5. 5 was almost always and 1 was almost never. After completing the three sections the total was out of 250 points of which I scored 229.

After looking back at the three sections I found that I had no preferred learning style as all of the sections has a difference in range of 5 points. This would therefore suggest that I have many of the qualities for all three learning styles and can learn effectively bu using my different sensory channels.

This i feel is my strongest and preferred learning style as when I do find that I do favour looking at graphics and pictures. I also find it easier to learn from bullet points rather than a whole block of text. It makes it easier for me to keep my interest focused and when making notes I use this technique.

Some other points that I have noticed when looking at how visual people learn is that they have advanced planning, good spelling, note detail and are meticulous. These are all qualities that I feel I have, however I am not quiet by nature and do not enjoy reading in my spare time.

During my time in education I have found that I find it easier to use 'cue' words, colour codes, charts, maps and illustrations to aid my learning. I also have a tendency to use mnemonics, acronyms, visual chains an mind maps. Again these are all strong and suggested aids for how a visual learner best learns.

I also have some auditory qualities as I like to memorise by using steps in a sequence, which is why I find bullet points easy to read. I also remember faces and can be distracted sometimes. This is something that I need to work on, and find that listening to music when in a room full of people channels my focus better and I am able to gt my head down to the task in hand.
Auditory learners also make up rhymes and poems to aid there learning, and when trying to focus on very academic work I too do this.

Furthermore, I have several kinaesthetic characteristics but feel that these relate more to me as a person rather than my preferred learning style in an academic sense. I am willing to try new things, dress for comfort and express my emotions through a physical means. With regard to academic I am not a poor speller. When I have a lot of things to do I also ind myself making a to do list, as I feel that this gives me a sense of self accomplishment when I have completed the tasks. As with the other two learning styles kinaesthetic learners too use mnemonics, which is where my learning styles overlap.

Transparency and colour film work

One of the first assignments was a first location shoot at the cathedral at Wakefield.

After arriving at the location I walked inside the cathedral noticed that the lighting was not very good and therefore long exposures were required. This was a little bit of a problem as I did not have a tripod with me, however there were several tables, chairs and surfaced that I could rest the camera on.

I was a little aprehensive about this as I have not shot on film for about 7 years and have never used transparency film. Nevertheless I made sure that I knew how to change the settings on my film camera. Unfortunately, half way through shooting my films the camera broke and I was unable to complete the task.

I have since been back this time with a tripod and shot both films and had them processed.

Reflection of my first exhibition

At the end of the academic year we have an end of year show and when looking at how unorganised the first exhibition was, I am determined that the next one will be a success. Fortunately before this, we have another chance to show some more of our work over the Easter period.

As a group I feel that everyone will be able to benefit from being a little better organised as we lacked direction and were all a bit unsure of what was required from us. I felt that we were not very cohesive and lacked drive and focus. Although this did not have an effect on my personal motivation, it did make me feel like I had failed on a personal level.

As I stated before on my blog, it was a great opportunity to show myself the work that I could produce and felt comfortable with the work that I put on the walls. I was a little disappointed that there were no professional people from the industry, as everyone was asked to try and invite at least one other photographer. I did feel that this was partially my fault, as it was the exhibition was not marketed properly, and is something that I want to try and push in the Easter show.

I have thought of several ways to do this from contacting local papers and radio stations to designing flyer's and sending out emails to local people within the industry. Hopefully this will have a better effect and it will help to generate more interest and awareness and result in a future client base.