So close, yet so far away...

The last couple of days of my course at West Dean went well. On Saturday the sun came out and we spent the morning on an assignment at Weald & Downland Open Air Museum. It's the kind of thing I have done a hundred times before for radio, but this time I had to reeducate my brain to look for pictures and not listen for audio. So the main interview became a "general view" photo and vox pops became close up pictures - simple! 

By the end of the weekend I honestly felt like there couldn't have been a better course personally designed for me and where I am right now. Given that the timing worked out so well for our trip down south and that it was the first time they had run it, I was pretty lucky!

However, flying back to Scotland on Sunday was not straight-forward. After first discovering my driving license had flown 24 hours ahead of me (in Jim's wallet) I then lost my boarding pass in departures and finally endured an hour delay to the flight with absolutely no information (though not as bad as Jim & Theo's 7 hour delay the day before!) It was almost as if fate was trying to stop me going back...

And guess what? After all that time learning how to sell photos of a news story, the very next day my home village hit the headlines with torrential rain and flooding! Can you imagine how frustrating that was? Have a look at my mum's Flickr photostream to get an idea of what I missed out on!

So back in Scotland I'm now on the lookout for a good photo story. Preferably one that fits around childcare and isn't too far away - Not too much to ask surely?!

In which I get my brain working again...

We're down south this week. Visiting family, attending a wedding, and (for me) doing a course. The first two were the reasons we booked the flights, and then by chance I spotted the photography course at a local college, which happened to not only bridge my old and new skills, but also fitted the dates we were in the area.

So I am back learning for three days! The course is being run at the beautiful West Dean college, which for my overseas readers, is probably every cliche of an English college you can possibly imagine.  It's a beautiful historic building in the Sussex countryside, with formal gardens and rolling hills full of sheep.

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There are four other students on my course and it's run by an excellent tutor with 25 years experience of press photography. It is a VERY steep learning curve, with very talented fellow photographers and a mind-boggling amount of crucial information about the way papers work (who knew that one newspaper has strict rules about the way women dress, and another bans photos of people on sofas?)

Included in our agenda today, we had 10 minutes to do a portrait session of a fellow student for a news piece. I became completely distracted by the building and came out of it with a photo that was more about a nice door than the person I was photographing. I think this is what living in a military quarter, with absolutely no architectural features does to you!

Tomorrow I return for the second day and (weather permitting) a field trip to the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum. Already I feel like I'm going to need to lie down for a week to absorb everything I've learned - fat chance of that!

Nine months and counting...

Theo is now three-quarters of the way through his first year of life and crawling! One Tuesday morning about three weeks ago he suddenly worked out how to shuffle his legs forwards and he was off. We now spend most of our days pulling him away from the broadband router, the fake coals in the fire, the stack of cookery books in the kitchen or the cord of the iron. Why is it that with all the experience and money behind the big toy brands, no one has yet invented something that is more alluring than the forbidden things in a house?

Although the summer has generally been disappointing so far, there have been a few warm days to get him out in the garden, an experience which has met with mixed results! He's still extremely unsure about the feel of grass on his skin and left on a rug will remain marooned until someone returns to save him!

With a new way to burn off energy he's appetite seems endless. As his menu expands, we even tried him on a recipe containing lamb's liver (much to Jim's horror!) and he seemed to love it. Bouncing up and down in the high chair, murmuring sounds of appreciation!

Talking of high chairs, as I mentioned a while ago, around Christmas I took on the task of repainting our inherited Tripp Trapp high chair. It very rapidly turned into one of those things I wish I had never started! I bought two types of paint (spray and regular) and two types of sandpaper and spent most of the winter trying to get a proper finish on it, and failed. So Jim came home from Afghanistan and took over, he bought an electric sander, undid all my work and then varnished it. Four months, a lot of money and effort later (and with the addition of a £50 play tray and £30 harness) we ended up with a chair that looked identical to the one we had when we started - Gah!

All of this was even more frustrating when we saw the high chair my mother bought for him to keep at their house, which cost £15 from Ikea! The moral to this story is if you are ever in need of a high chair, and are near an Ikea, simply do not bother even considering anything other than the Antilop Chair, I cannot fault it!