Feels like spring

JONESBORO, Ark. – The cold wave has broken and it feels like spring here this morning.

It’s sunny and 35 degrees, but it feels much warmer. Maybe that’s just a reaction to spending several days in a freezer.

It was truly bizarre to drive down two-lane state roads southeast of Baton Rouge, La. on Saturday morning and see Spanish moss hanging from trees standing in frozen swamps. However miserable people in Arkansas were with the cold snap, it must have been absolutely horrible for folks in the Deep South where insulation and furnaces aren’t considered essential home equipment.

I’ve decided to take on another digital photography class at the senior center. Happily, another guy is interested in teaching an introductory class, making it possible for me to do something more advanced.

I enjoyed teaching an introductory class in the fall of 2008, but it drew a wide range of students, ranging from experienced photographers to older people who were struggling with the basics of Windows. It’s very frustrating to talk about f-stops and depth of field to people who just want to be able to get their images out of their cameras and into their computers, then be able to find them again in the computer. It’s amazing to me how few people understand the directory tree structure of a PC. I ended up spending more time on Windows and computer basics than on photography.

I need to set some basic qualifications for my class, like:

• Know how to download photos from your camera and find them on your computer.
• Know how to e-mail a photo.

Then maybe I can talk about composition, depth of field, HDR, Photoshop, stuff like that. It’s tempting to make ownership of a digital SLR a requirement, but that would probably limit the class size to two or three people.