Photosmudger On the Road

• Student Turnout - 7/10. Pretty good numbers, although see below for more info.
• Number of Questions asked - 5/10. Not many, but fairly good ones, very business minded.
• Quality of Tea and Cakes - 9/10. A steady stream of hot black coffee provided by Frank, and a truly delightful stuffed mushroom for lunch.
• Overall Cleanliness of College - 10/10. Very clean indeed - hand wash stations every 2 yards, antiseptic wipes at the door, instructions on how to wash my hands in the gents. It all conspired to make me feel very dirty, which I probably am!
• Ability to handle the assignment - 7/10. A decent attempt, which just needed a bit of polish to make it really stand out. The only problem was.....
• Number of people who actually attempted the assignment - 1/10. It's a new record folks, just 4 people attempted the assignment. It means I got to leave early, but it doesn't really instil me with confidence that the students at UWE are displaying the initiative, drive and ambition that's required to be successful self-employed people. To those that did it, Jamie, Luke, Matt and Khalil - I salute you, you are hereby entitled to take the piss out of your peers for at least the next week.

The Lecture theatre at UEL, so big it makes it look like there's less people there.

• Student turnout - 8/10. Decent numbers, and lots of keen folk doing the brief in the afternoon.
• Number of Questions asked - 4/10. Not loads, but fairly good ones.
• Quality of tea and cakes - 6/10. Caffeine based beverages absolutely fine, but no cake products to be found. Maybe we didn't look hard enough.
• Number of students in the audience who also featured in the presentation - 10/10. You know who you are Mr Laing - enjoy the ski show at the weekend!
• Ability to handle the assignment - 6/10. Some very mixed responses, ranging from some of the most polished work yet, to people who just completely missed the point.
• Proximity to airports - 9/10. I'm a geek and I'll admit it. I spent a very pleasant 15 minutes staring across the water at planes coming in to land. At no point did I stick my arms out and go running round shouting "neeeooooow" though. Maybe next time.

Playing to a packed house at Lincoln. Can you see the students behind the Nikon Goodie Bags?

• Student Turnout - 3/10. Oh Dear. I think at the peak there were something like 27 people in the room, although people were coming and going throughout the talk, so that number went down quite a bit. See above photo for the view from the front.
• Number of Questions asked - 3/10. Oh Dear again, barely a single question.
• Quality of tea and cakes Fish and Chips - 10/10. The fringe benefits of visiting on a Friday I suppose.
• Number of huge beanbags - 9/10. Offered a golden opportunity to swan dive into them with whoops of joy.
• Ability to handle the assignment - 6/10. Only a handful of people took it up (which means we get to go home early) and they had a fair crack at it, but nothing that really knocked my socks off.

As part of the roadshow we set time-limited challenges to a select group of students at each college. The aim of the challenge is to get students working to fairly tight commercial briefs, where they haven't had weeks to prepare things, and have to deal with what happens on the day. They're also a chance to work some business studies in, as we expect a completed invoice to be handed in with the images. In fact, when I come to critique the work, I'm almost more interested in the invoice than the shots!

Just to give you a flavour of what to expect, here's a brief behind the scenes video with 2 guys from Reid Kerr college in Paisley, John Morrison and Stephen Smyth. I went along with them on the day, strictly as an observer, and shot some video of them at work. I should point out to those of you who are thinking of getting a sneak preview of what to shoot that they interpreted one of the briefs a certain way - if you go out and shoot an Audi garage it may well not be appropriate to the briefs you're set at your college!

Apologies for the slightly ropey quality of the video. It looked fine on my machine, but by the time it had been uploaded to YouTube it had turned a bit rank. I'm quite new to this whole video lark anyway, and have got a lot to learn on a technical level!

The good people over at Vue are currently asking for applicants for their internship program for next year. Whilst this is not an actual photographic position it's a unique opportunity to see how shoots are put together, budgets and productions are run, and how the advertising world works. Full details can be found here:

Internships

Given how much I go on about work experience (and boy, do I go on) this is too good to miss really. So what are you waiting for?. Read more on "Work Experience Opportunity."!

.... I was working for the Northants Evening Telegraph, and I'd rescued a dog from a river. I'm not sure if this is progress! Read more on "The Last time I was in a local paper...."!

• Student Turnout - 8/10. Lots of folk, particularly for Dave, Dennis and Duncan's afternoon off-camera flash demo.
• Number of Questions asked - 10/10. Pretty much all of this score is accounted for by Arek, who turned up with a bloody great shopping list!
• Quality of Tea and Cakes - 9/10. Lunch wheeled out to us in the lecture theatre. Mmmm, lazy.
• Ability of Tom's laptop to handle something simple like a USB key drive - 0/10. Time for a new one methinks. Mind you, this one's 4 years old and has been dropped more times than I care to remember, so no real cause for complaint.
• Number of people who used their own initiative on the assignment and thereby knocked our collective socks off - 10/10. You know who you are!