Whether we’re ready to admit it or not, the holidays are upon us. I tried as long as I could to ignore the names of the months passing by on the calendar, but, well, once Daylight Savings Time hit, denial turned to grief turned to acceptance turned to ‘ok, fine, let’s do this thing!’ Anyhow, chances are there’s a photographer in your family or group of friends that you’ll have to shop for, and while we're certainly a famously finicky bunch, I guarantee you, there’s still something that photographer “needs.” So here’s a list of things that will help turn that psychosis-inducing task of figuring it out into the easiest checkmark on your shopping list. Here are 10 fail-proof gifts for photographers in your circles.
So if you read my post My First Research Term For The Arcanum: Silence. Why? It's Complicated…, you’d know what this is all about. As Robin Griggs Wood’s apprentice in Trey Ratcliff’s Arcanum, part of each week’s challenge is to research a term that relates to creativity. While the first term I researched was silence, this time, I chose "chromatic aberration.” Whether you know what it is or not, you’ve seen it, you’ve experienced it, and it’s annoyed the living crap out of you, so here’s a basic breakdown of the bugger and what I’ve found.What Exactly Is Chromatic Aberration?
Part of the deal as an apprentice in The Arcanum is each week we are presented with a weekly challenge by our master, and with each weekly challenge, in addition to finding images based on a theme, we are to find a term that relates to creativity in some way (however broad is up to us) and research that term and what we found out about it. So while I was trying to think of what term I wanted to research for my first weekly challenge, I found myself navigating my way through the eternal Facebook stream of doom, looking for a post I saw earlier from a friend that I wanted to comment on, and all I could see are BE SCARED EBOLA OBAMA DEMOCRAPUBLICANS TERRORISM EBOLA LIBERAL HELL WRATH CONSERVATIVE RACIST FIRE DOOM DIE OH YEAH AND EBOLA when all I could think to myself was, ‘shut up already!’ So, that was the birth of the term I wanted to research for my first weekly challenge in The Arcanum: Silence.
So this is where it all got real. The experiences, the Networks, The Challenges. It’s all part of the process here in The Arcanum, but all of it, at first, seems a bit disconnected, another virtual forum, albeit a more positively engaging one sans the trolls and the, but, still,
I am now Wasim The Inspired!!
And with that, things immediately get a bit more serious.
So if you haven’t heard of it yet, you need to hear of it before yet. Like now. Right now. It’s the future of learning and education, it’s based on the master/apprentice model, it was created by Trey Ratcliff, and it's called The Arcanum.
The idea is simple…a master chooses an apprentice, and the apprentice learns the craft. The craft in this case is photography. The execution…is seemingly brilliant. Using today’s technologies - everything from real time screen sharing and VR on-location sharing - mixed with a structured and tiered leveling system, and you have yourself what could be a glimpse into the future of education.
