"Aaugh! I been shot!"

Dude, did anybody not have a great time with the group Saturday?! Major kudos to those of you who came out and totally made my weekend awesome! I am pizzzumped!! For those of you who couldn't make it --don't worry, we won't excommunicate you ...yet =) -- here's what you missed out on. Hope you can make it next time! Below that are some other miscellaneous notes and oatmeal recipes.

About five of us met at Starbucks in Georgetown and talked shop for a while. The conversation began by taking a look "under the hood" of the camera and figuring out what's going on when you shoot in Program (or automatic) mode, but it didn't stop there. One person would ask a question, which then led to two or three rabbit trails of its own, and so it went. We got a little bit carried away talking and practicing different techniques (and by "practicing" I mean taking pictures of my shoes ....yeah, you had to be there. =)

So around 12:45ish we made our way to La Madeline to grab some lunch, and there we were joined by a handful of other camera-wielding peeps. After lunch we strolled down M Street, snapping pictures along the way. Our fascination with nothing in particular seemed to reach a climax when we found ourselves posing for a group photo. ...definitely good times, my friends!

Shortly after three o'clock about half of the camera batteries died. We figured that was reason enough to call it a day, but not without first savoring some ice cream at Hagen Das (I'm not even gonna bother spelling that correctly and using all those weird punctuation marks) and sharing pictures from the day.

That's pretty much how it all went down on Saturday. I would love to hear what you all learned, or what you liked the most. Feel free to post your thoughts a comments here or on the message board.


Now for the other stuff...

On the right of this page you will notice a new section of links (I know I know, you're thinking, "How many stinkin' links do we need, Stephen?!" but all I hear is "blah blah blahh...." =) In addition to the message board, we've got a Yahoo! Photos site. Also, this week we kick off our Excercise of the Week. As I said before, the majority of the excercises are extremely simple. They are designed to help stretch your creativity and strengthen your appreciation of the world we live in. They aren't required, but I think you'll find them fun to do anyway.

For everyone shooting digital, please upload your photos to our Yahoo! Photos page. To do this, you will need to sign in to Yahoo! Photos using the following user name: nccphotography and password: justshootme Organizational tools are pretty limited with Yahoo! but here's how we'll do it. We will create one new album each group activity. For example, we have a Georgetown album where we can all upload our pictures from Georgetown. To differentiate between photographers, add your name or initials to all your pictures. On the Georgetown album, you will notice that all the files that begin with "MCA" were taken by Marie Claire. You can easily rename the photos online after you have logged in and uploaded them. Make sense? Cool. For reasons too boring to explain here, I can only upload the pictures from my "combat" camera. I'll put the rest of mine online when I can.

If you've come here looking for oatmeal recipes, please go home. There are none. It is a figment of your imagination. However, feel free to post any comments regarding how many points your cholesterol was lowered by eating oatmeal. ...I'm feelin' an ice breaker!! =D

A few of you have had some questions about the member profile pages (member links on right). Apparently, you guys can't edit pages/posts that I've made. If you want to make any changes to your profile page, just go ahead and leave a comment on your page noting any changes you would like to make, then I'll edit the page to reflect those changes. I realize this is not the most efficient method, but that's how we'll do it for now (until next semester maybe??). Also, please send me a picture of you (or a link to a picture of you) that I can put on your page.

The tentative plan for next week was a sunset shoot, but I'm not yet sure if I will be able to do that. (It's all about me... =) Hopefully well before Friday I will know what we'll do this Saturday. Thank you all for being so rockin' awesome!

P.S. The title of this post comes from the movie Hook. It is precisely 7.4 times funnier if you can recall how Robin Williams said it. =)