Halfway through the module and these first five weeks have flown by. I am literally just managing to keep my head above water and am keeping up to date with presentations, seminars and tutorials but not doing as much reading as I would like that may have to be a Christmas catch up as this week is one of being away on a client’s site all week in the Northeast, working all day and focusing on preparing my first assignment the oral presentation. In theory this should be easy talking through a PowerPoint presentation is something I do with my job far too frequently! The challenges are keeping it to 8 minutes, I’m a natural talker and can quite happily talk for hours with an audience (willing or otherwise!) and surprisingly I have never made a video of myself talking and that is going to be an interesting experience. 

The first draft was, well maybe not great too few images, too few playing down my successes and not enough critical analysis. Some well-informed feedback from Gem saw me sat in a hotel in Blackpool on a wet and windy afternoon rewriting my presentation ready for recording when we got home on the Sunday. I’m usually organised and have things completed well ahead of the due date but this time I’m under pressure and rushing to get the presentation onto YouTube (another life first!) and submitted. Suffice to say it was submitted with a few hours to spare! Need to give myself more time for the next assignment.

Reading week turned out to be a bit of a damp squid I managed to catch up on all the essential reading from the first 5 topics and halfway through a book Gem recommended ‘why it does not have to be in focus” by Jackie Higgins which looks at almost all the topics covered in the first five weeks and dissects classic images of the last 20 years in a range of genres. I can see this becoming a much-used book in time. There is another dozen books on my office shelf all waiting for me to find time to read! I need a long-haul business trip to get through some of them! 

This week’s image comes from of my commercial shoots at a local Business exhibition with labour Peer Lord Barry Jones making a forceful point!