Tent Rocks Canyon

This morning we each had to get up and present our work from yesterday. The first person to present took half an hour which was very tedious. More on him later...Then everyone else managed to present their work in 5-10 minutes. We had to talk about things that worked or didn't work in the shoot and what we were planning to do. My hairdressing salon shoot went well. Raoul said “Congratulations. Well done girl. You did good.” He liked that I had told a story with my images.

Other people explored the tattoo parlour, jewellery making store, cafe, weaver, bar and drugstore. It was good to see how many “characters” from the town people had found to shoot.

Then we watched a slideshow of Raoul's under water photography- amazing shots of whales, sharks, turtles and fish. There was a photo of Raoul holding the rig for the underwater camera and two side flashes. It ws huge.

One of the the unbelievable photos was from his series on the Everglades in Florida. He got up close and personal with an alligator and shot half under and half above the water surface. It was incredible.

I forgot to say that the food here has been great at breakfast and lunch. It is all very freshly prepared by Diana and her husband.

This afternoon we drove out to Tent Rocks Canyon for a shoot with another model. I photographed Jade (she must be mid 40s but very experienced model). She was lovely. Very easy to work with. The shots turned out well, I thought. I was very frustrated though because our group leader/tutor is not assertive and doesn't move people along fast enough to get each person the allocated 15 minutes time to work with the model on a rotation. The first guy took 40 minutes. I was getting so annoyed with him because he was all talk and little action. When I finally said it was probably good for the next person to have a go, he said that his 15 minutes had only just started because he had spent all that time getting the flash working. He was so slow. A lovely man but a very slow worker and it drove me bananas.

When we got back to the Workshops, Ines and I chatted for a while before going downtown to a drinks night at the teacher's place. We went to Evangelos' Bar first and got some photos of the jass band playing. Then we made a brief appearance at Raoul's before getting a lift back with some of the ladies to the dorms. BTW, we caught a lift into town from halfway down the road into town from an American/Italian photographer called Jim Vecchi.