While I wait

OCA have the APEL and it will be looked at during March. Nothing to do now but wait and think about all the changes I should have made. In the meantime I have just spent a glorious 3 days in The Lake District. Blue sky, snow, no wind or rain, it was heaven. Up at 5am every morning and out shooting by dawn. Day 1 Castlerigg Stone Circle. Used the D3 with 17-35 zoom, 80-200 zoom and the 24 TS. It was so cold (-5) that the frost stled on the ND Lee filter and may have spoiled some as I didnt notice it till after a while of shooting. A few that excite me from this location. The remainder of the day, so, so.

APEL Finished

At last. The final version is now being printed and burned to CD. The outcome of course is the next milestone.

Modifications to APEL

I have reworked the APEL yet again. Two reasons for this. Firstly, I have brought it more into line with the modules I am seeking exemption and secondly, having seen the work of Sharon Kaplan. Sharon's APEL is excellent and while I don't intend to copy or plagiarise her work it has acted as guidance. In Particular I have worked on the text. My normal everyday writing skills are in a technical environment and tend to be straight to the point binary statements. Here and beyond into the course this will not be good enough and I need to work on my writing skills. I have a copy of "the arts - Good study Guide" by The OU and I am finding the chapters on writing skills to be particularly useful.

I have revisited the photographs and resized. They were too big and cut and paste into a word document wasn't working, so now I have real sized them for the page at 300 dpi and have the larger size files if I need them.

In addition I am revisiting my entire back portfolio to ensure that my best work is included in the application.

Nearly there !!

The APEL is finally coming together. I have changed the format and decided to go for Level 1 completely after reading the syllabus and looking through all the work I have and matching the OCA requirements. I have also done a trial run to prepare the whole thing as a .pdf file using PDF Creator, free software without using Adobe !. OCA do not make this an easy task. On one hand they say "A random collection of images will not gain you credits" which is fine, but in the next sentence they want to see "visual curiosity, excellent observation, technical skill, original thinking, experimentation, etc etc" which could well end up looking like some random selection if all those requirements are to be met.

So, if nothing else this is teaching me Editing. I have thousands of images, and to select the correct 30 maximum for this is causing a lot of head scratching, inserting and deleting.