Susan Sharpless Smith

Over the past year, I’ve become aware of a feeling of unrest within myself. I love my life, my career and my family. But I know myself well enough to know that I am happiest when I have new challenges and have specific goals that stretch me. With the beginning of a new academic year approaching, I’ve been considering what new goals I can set that will satisfy my need to be moving forward in my life achievements.

Over the past few years, my goals have involved succeeding in a new position at ZSR Library, writing a 3rd edition of my book, competing in long distance triathlon racing, and developing new skills as an amateur photographer. I have managed to meet those goals at a level that tells me it’s time to set some new ones.

Changes at work have affected my assessment of where I’d like to head: we became library faculty a year ago and that created new professional expectations, both internal and external. I am now more aware of the credentials that most faculty bring to the table and realize that having  the “right” degree makes a difference in how you are accepted in professional dealings on campus.  I know it shouldn’t make a difference if a library faculty “terminal degree” is at the Masters level, but I’ve heard too many comments that confirm that a PhD is a baseline degree to be accepted as a colleague. So I’ve decided to take the plunge and attempt to enter a doctoral program in higher education at UNCG. For now, I’ve signed up to take an initial class while I work through the application process. I’ve started studying for the GRE (my scores expired 13 years ago!). I tell myself that I am doing this for myself, not for any other benefits it could bring!

I am not yet to the point where I am ready to admit that I’ve reached the apex of my professional career. I want to take one more step up and become a director/dean of a library. To that end, my dean is giving me fantastic support through mentoring and providing me with multiple opportunities for experiences that will enhance my skill set: grant administration, leadership on special projects, positions on University committees  and support to attend a year-long WFU Career Development for Women Leaders Program. I think that working towards a Phd will strengthen this goal for me.

My fitness has been an important daily focus for over 10 years. I’ve learned that I do love to compete athletically even though I am strictly an “age-grouper.” I had a secret goal of one day competing in a full ironman, but my ongoing issues with plantar fasciitis really slowed me down. Now I find that I don’t really desire to commit the time that is required to properly train for the long distance races (70.3 half ironman events). I’ve proven to myself that I can do them (having completed 5  and a half-still not over the race where I crashed!). So, this summer I’ve been reassessing my fitness goals and am working with my personal trainer, Jill Coleman, to come up with a new workout that involves higher intensity workouts for shorter times. She and her husband, Jade Teta, have become very prominent in developing the concept of Metabolic Effect training and I am ready to give it a go. Particularly since I am starting back to school, I think that this will allow me to stay fit but open up more time for studying and home-front activities!

I hope to be able to maintain a decent work/study/life balance. I want to continue to improve my photography skills.  My family life with my husband, children and granddaughter are very important to me. They always have been my biggest supporters, so I predict they will be key in helping me meet my new life goals. Wish me luck!

My plan to continue to improve my photography skills includes taking advantage of any local photo class opportunities. Sawtooth has a photography program that offers a variety of short course topics. Portraiture is a 4 evening course to teach techniques when photographing people. The instructor is Kelly Story.

Our first assignment was to find an image in a magazine or on the web and to try to replicate it. I selected an image from the Wake Forest Magazine:

This is my attempt:

The first class was a “get acquainted” evening and the second evening focused on how to pose people to emphasize good features and minimize not-so-good features.

I am hoping that the last two classes will cover lighting and how to capture people in more casual settings (not in a studio). You can see from my flickr portrait set that I prefer environmental portrait where I capture people in the real world!

A Glass of 2007 Barbera from Brandon Hills Vineyard

My typical journeys into Yadkin County are on my bike. Sometimes I will pass by a vineyard in my travels, but never stop to visit. Wine sipping and road biking concurrently don’t mix too well.

One of Ron’s colleagues at his work told him about his family’s vineyard, Brandon Hills, officially in Yadkinville, but really very close to Lone Hickory, one of my regular biking routes. I have been by the turn-off scores of times totally focused on putting the miles behind me, so I never noticed the sign.

What better way to spend a cool summer afternoon than a drive out to this new boutique vineyard for a wine tasting? The vineyard is beautiful, with a covered wraparound porch boasting a view of the 3 acres of grapevines.

View of the Vineyard in HDR

The wines were excellent. We tried all of them and liked the 2007 Barbera the best. It was a lovely way to pass the afternoon and we left with a case of wine that can only be obtained at the vineyard.

Art Gallery Visit in Asheville

I had the best intentions of chronicling my entire week at John C. Campbell Folk School. And I was half way there last Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, we took our second field trip and traveled to Asheville where we spent the day photographing in galleries in the art district, architecture in the downtown area and finally, in Biltmore Village. But we didn’t get back to Brasstown until after 10 pm, so it was straight to bed without writing about the wonderful day we had. I photographed over 250 images that day alone! The last day, on Friday, was another blur of activity. We had a morning class that covered “advanced” topics like dodging and burning, clone tool, and the magic wand (in Photoshop). Then we had to curate our show (pick which prints we wanted to include). The show is done at the end of each week to provide a venue to highlight each student’s accomplishments. We each chose 3 images to print, and then picked two from that to display at our “booth.” In addition, we each picked 10 images from our Asheville trip to go on the slideshow that played on a laptop.

Photography Class Exhibit

After a successful show, I had to scramble to pack and hit the road to meet my son, Josh, at the Grove Park Inn where he had a weekend conference. Since it was on the way home, it was an easy decision to join him at a resort I have heard about for years. Josh lined up a spa appointment for me, so I spent most of Saturday there while he studied for his re-certification exam that’s coming up this week. It wasn’t a burden…..

View of the Spa

Anyway, here it is Tuesday night, almost a week from my last musings and I didn’t want to leave my photography camp week story unfinished. You will most likely appreciate that it is compressed into two paragraphs, but these really don’t convey the sum of all the content I was introduced to last week, in what was one of the most fun vacation weeks I’ve ever had!

Today we were back into the classroom at the studio in the Orchard House. Our goals for the day were to learn about our instructor’s method of file management and to learn a few important Photoshop tricks to enhance our photographs.

Our instructor, Patrick, is an IT guy by profession. As such, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that he has a scalable method to manage the over-50,000 images in his inventory.  His methods are ones we adhere to at ZSR Library when organizing our digital collections, but they are ones that I’ve never considered were very important when dealing with categorizing my personal images.  However, since I have over 5,000 images on Flickr and heaven knows how many on various hard drives, I was ready to listen and learn.

Patrick’s system revolves around the idea of “sessions.” A session is any grouping of photo-taking events that naturally fall together. For instance, a week of vacation photos at the beach would be one session in Patrick’s world.  So, unlike me, he doesn’t make a folder of the event and then a sub-folder for each day of the event.

He names a top level folder with the year: 2010. Then the subfolders for that year start with the date of the beginning of the event using this syntax: 2010-07-12, followed by a space dash space and a keyword describing the event.

So this week’s pictures for me would all go in a folder named: 2010-07-11 – JCCFS
*note: JCCFS stands for John C. Campbell Folk School

The next level down contains two subfolders:
Source
Variations

The “source” folder holds a copy of the “digital negative”, meaning the original digital image. This image is sacrosanct and never is deleted or modified. A copy of the digital negative also goes into the “variations” folder. These are the copies that you manipulate. The difference between his system and my current one is that he separates the source (my term: archival copy) and the derivatives (his term: variations) into two separate folders and then keeps the original file name so that he can refer back to the original if necessary. I always have named my modified files with an easily recognizable keyword type of name that I can understand if I browse through. I can see the value of keeping the original file name and he told me he would provide me with a script that could automate naming multiple versions of the “variations” files differently.

The interesting portion of this morning session is that most of the six student group did not really understand how to copy their images from their cameras to the computer or have experience creating file folders and nesting them. It was relaxing to sit back and watch Patrick have to work the room with everyone’s individual laptop programs and processes :-)

After a lunch break that featured pork BBQ, coleslaw and pecan pie, we returned (or should I say waddled) back to the studio for an afternoon of getting acquainted with Photoshop. Thankfully, I have some experience with the program although I use very limited aspects of it. I was hoping for some pearls of wisdom from Patrick on different ways to easily enhance the photos I take and I wasn’t disappointed.

He offered up a 4 step process to use when enhancing an image in Photoshop:

1. Crop the photo to the size and dimensions that you desire. Don’t hold yourself to conventional print dimensions (like 5×7 or 8×10), let the image tell you what is best
2. Decide if the image should by color or black & white
3. Adjust  the levels
4. Fix the hue/saturation

The idea of freeing myself from conventional image dimensions was exciting. I’ve been such a unadventurous thinker about this, even though I don’t really think in term of fitting my image to a certain size to fit in a frame, I still maintain the ration aspect of the original image dimensions.

I’ve only ever used “levels” to correct gross errors in my exposures. Patrick introduced us to the salt and pepper technique of adjusting levels. In each image, people want to see (even if they don’t realize this) some black (shadows) and some white (highlights). The level tool has three sliders: shadows (on the left), middle hues (in the middle) and highlights (on the right). To obtain the best combination you:

1. Drag the middle slider all the way to the left. What’s left are the true shadows of this image.
2. Click on the black slider and move it over to the right until you determine the level of shadow you want. You want to see a “peppered” effect: spots of black, not large blocks of black
3. Move the middle slider all the way back to the right so it is adjacent to the white slider.
4. Slide the white to the left until you set your highlights. Again, you want to see a “peppered” white effect rather than large white blocks.
5. Then do final adjustments by sliding the middle grey slider to the point where the levels look balance.

When using the hue/saturation tool, the most important adjustment will be made using saturation. Often, upping the saturation will provide the “pop” that brings an extra boost to make the image stand out.

We spent most of the afternoon practicing using these techniques. You be the judge of whether you think they improve a few of my images!

Original

Original Image

Enhanced

Enhanced Image

The evening was a social one as it turns out. After the 6 pm dinner (ham, collard greens, white beans and cornbread with banana pudding for dessert), I headed back to Rock House meaning to get my camera and wander down to Brasstown to take some shots. Instead, I found the living room full of the watercolor folks having a lively party. I had to wade through to get to my room and spotted one of my fellow photography students whose spouse is doing watercolor this week. They invited me to join them and in the spirit of my pledge to join in this week, they were able to twist my arm fairly easily!

Dry Falls

Today we took a field trip that looped us down into Georgia and back into North Carolina taking us through the Chattahoochee and Nantahala National Forests. We visited overlooks and waterfalls to practice the manual techniques we learned yesterday. We went to three different falls and used tripods to try to capture the movement of the water by doing longer exposures. It is harder than it looks!

The weather cooperated all day and everyone enjoyed the extended time to fiddle with settings and try new ideas. The JCCFS staff packed us a picnic lunch so we were able to stay in the “wild” all day long!

We returned in time to squeeze in a run before the skies let loose with rain that has been continuing on and off all evening. Once again, I am processing my photos and computing as I listen to the contra dance music. This evening they must be short of available women as I’ve been asked to dance several times even though it’s obvious I have two left feet!

Tomorrow, it’s back into the photo studio for a little file management and Photoshop lessons. I am currently installing Picasa in preparation for the file sharing instruction. It is scanning my hard drive looking for images. It is finding things I didn’t even know existed. Maybe it’s time to get organized!

Log Cabin

I arrived here with some expectations and made some assumptions about how each day would be structured. Since part of every day for me includes exercise, I loaded my bike and packed my running clothes thinking that it would be easy to fit in an hour or so of activity before breakfast. I didn’t do as well with my weather forecasting as I woke to rain yesterday morning. Sunday evening there wasn’t enough time to orient myself to the lay of the land on the 300 acre campus in regard to running paths, nor drive around to see the condition of the roads (I only know they are hilly and don’t seem to have shoulders).  So, it wasn’t a hard decision to make to skip that and head straight to Keith House where there are large pots of coffee (bring your own mug) and wi-fi.

There is a structured schedule that starts with Morningsong at 7:15 am and runs through the nightly contra dance at 10 pm.  The only mandatory parts of the day are class times, from 9 to noon and 1:30 to 4:30. However, I decided that, to get the full experience, I should participate in all the activities, even if only as a spectator. So far, I am really enjoying seeing all the talented people who are here to study about their music and dancing as they share their talents throughout the day. In addition, I am being provided with interesting subjects to photograph!

Our first class covered all the theories of photography – how ISO, shutter speed and aperture work together with the available light to produce your desired results. I have been introduced to all of these concepts in previous readings and classes, but it is a complex idea that I have difficulty wrapping my head around because it is all math! However, our instructor Patrick, seems to have a way of offering up easily understandable analogies that really helped me understand the concepts.  For instance, he likened ISO, f-stop and shutter speeds to a sound system. ISO is like the volume on the system – ranging from low to high (producing fine resolution to grainy as you let more light in). You make an initial decision about what “volume” you want and set it.  The other two variables, f/stop and shutter speed, can be compared to treble and bass. They determine the main “acoustics” of an image and will be what you will adjust more often.

I wasn’t the only person in class who becomes confused when you start to talk about the numbers that represent f/stop and shutter speed ranges. The numbers seem counter intuitive, but it’s important to understand them in a basic way to make them work together. F/stop ranges refer to the opening in the aperture and vary by the lens you are using. My 18-200 zoom lens ranges from f/3.5 to f/22.  The smaller number actually is the larger aperture opening; while the f/22 is when the aperture is almost closed.

Aperture Chart

Shutter speed range is determined by the mechanics of the camera body and is expressed in seconds and fractions of seconds. My D90 has a range of 30 seconds to 1/4000 of a second. But if you look at the LED display on my camera, it is expressed as 30 “ to 4000, so you can see how that would be off putting to the mathematically challenged!

The most important part to grasp is that these two settings have to balance out to create an image with the correct exposure.  And there are an infinite number of combinations that are possible when you are dealing with light. It was helpful that Patrick made this chart to show us the extremes.

Setting Ranges

After lunch, the plans were to head outdoors and start practicing what we learned in the morning. Patrick wanted us to work strictly in manual mode where we would have to determine the ISO, f/stop and shutter speed for each picture, plus manually focus the shot. I’ve managed to become somewhat competent working with one of the settings manually while letting the camera adjust the other. So, knowing that I might have to put on my math hat to figure out the relationship between two variables was intimidating (setting the ISO isn’t very daunting).

Our Outdoor Studio

Right when we were ready to head out, the skies opened up and poured rain. However, this is a big campus so we found a covered pavilion where we could set up our tripods and start learning the settings. Before I could get too muddled, Patrick told us about the electronic exposure display in the viewfinder that can be used to easily “zero” out the f/stop and shutter speed to produce the proper exposure. All the time I have been using my camera, I had never really paid attention to the information available in the bottom of the view finder.  So, if you choose your aperture size, this display shows little bars that, as you turn the shutter speed adjustment button, visually shows the bar heading back to zero. Once you get it there, your balance is “perfect”!

We spent the rest of class time (the rain finally stopped) taking shots to learn how to produce the proper balance. I also learned how the histogram that my camera can display helps to show if you have reached the “sweet spot” of proper exposure. My second goal for the afternoon was to try out my new 35mm lens, so that was fun. It really is excellent in picking up detail of a macro shot.

After class ended, I combined the need to do some exercise with my desire to keep taking pictures by taking a hike across campus with my camera in hand. Even though we are in the mountains, it is still in the 90s and was extremely humid. By the end of the hour (dinner is promptly at 6 pm), I was dripping wet but had taken some nice shots and seen the sights!

Contra Dancing

Evening hours include music and dancing and I found a comfortable place to sit and process my images while enjoying the music. I also practiced taking indoor shots of the dancers which is hard to do in manual mode.

What a fun day!

Rock House, Where my Room is!

I have been wanting to learn all I can to improve my photography skills. I know it will enhance my enjoyment of my “hobby” if I can become proficient at being able to manually manipulate the exposure to bring the results I am looking for before I take it into Photoshop!

So, I am here in Brasstown, NC at John C. Campbell Folk School for a week of photography classes. I arrived yesterday afternoon in time for orientation, dinner and an evening session to meet my instructor, Patrick Esmonde, and fellow students. We planned out the week which will include a few field trips. Our first “homework” was to assign each student to investigate where to manually adjust the ISO, aperature (f/stop),  and shutter speed. And to know, for our particular camera/lens, what the minimum/maximum ranges of those are. That was a fairly easy assignment, but it was helpful to pull out my manual and read through some of that information.

The school is a different experience for me. There are scores of people here attending different courses that range from blacksmithing to music to  cooking. Meals are served family style and so it didn’t take long for me to meet several people over dinner and hear about what brought them here for the week. Many people have been coming for years, but there are a lot of newcomers like me also.

Connectivity is a challenge. They’ve not heard of 3G out here and the only is wi-fi in the Keith House, where I am sitting now sipping on my coffee and listening to “Morningsong” a daily half hour of music and songs before breakfast is served at 8:15. After breakfast, class will start. It will run all morning, break for lunch and then resume until 4:30. There is supposed to be hard wire Internet in the photography studio but it was down and out last evening.

My plan is to write about my experience each day and to post the photos I take in my Flickr site. I hope I see them steadily improve in quality :-)

As we have for the past few years, we celebrated Independence Day with family in Pinehurst, NC. We picnicked at Lake Pinehurst and then went to Pinehurst Country Club to watch fireworks. It was a fun day that is becoming a family tradition! Thanks to my sister, Mary, and her husband, Rick, for hosting the event.

Last weekend the American Library Association held its annual conference in Washington, DC. I am on the LITA National Forum Planning Committee for the October conference and the committee meets at both midwinter and ALA annual. In addition, my new book was being introduced at the ALA Store, so that was a big deal for me!

Since we obtained faculty status, attendance at ALA has increased. This time around there were about 10 faculty from ZSR attending. We all were trying to economize because it was the end of the fiscal year, so I gathered together 5 people who were willing to carpool from Winston-Salem to DC. The library has just purchased a Nissan Quest van for use with our forthcoming remote storage project, so we were able to borrow the van to transport us all up to the conference.

It was a busy weekend with many sessions, meetings and networking opportunities.  I stayed busy from 7 am to bedtime both Saturday and Sunday. A few highlights of the weekend were Erik’s 4 hour program on Cloud Computing and Kevin’s award breakfast where he was named a Lyrasis NextGen Librarian.

Even during a busy conference, there is always time to have fun. Carolyn, Erik and I shared a room to minimize cost, but we maximized chances to enjoy the city. We hiked 2 miles from our hotel, the Washington Hilton, to the conference center to earn daily summer Olympic activity points. We explored Chinatown, attended a few social  networking events, visited the Mall and the Museum of Natural History, a dinner in the Dupont Circle area, swam in the hotel lap pool and did an 8 mile Monday morning run that took me by all the big monuments!

I wrote about the conference in ZSR Library’s Professional Development Blog.