I spent a fair while writing out this mornings post. Over a couple of sittings, and it didn’t save properly. Are you having trouble with your internet too? I can usually pick up when schools out with the influx of kids on the lines. Now it is just a constant slow. It is at times like these we all wish we hadn’t skimped on the National Broadband Network. How many businesses have turned to being online? How many people are now reliant on it for communications with loved ones? News? And of course entertainment and education.
My son’s school has been using distance learning for a week now, with the kids at home, and finally the teachers are at home too. Unfortunately they still don’t get that you need to talk to the kids. Setting endless homework isn’t distance education is it? I think they will get there, it is a bit of a headspace jump isn’t it?
People have been congratulating me with the launch of Len’s Club. http://lensschool.com/lensclub
It has been such hard work and so timely. To think I have been working on this for so long and to be able to start it when we all really need something like this. I definitely need it. Teaching others gets me out of my state of overwhelming sadness about what is going on. This, honestly, is my first real world event. I was too young for either of the world wars. I just haven’t lived through a major shift in the world before. History unfolds. It is horrific to watch and experience. To feel everyone’s pain and fear is hard for an empath.
So in case you missed the original annoucment for the Launch of Len’s Club. I would like to explain what I am up too. I have been working on an online version of my photography school for years. Ideas come up, and unfortunately I have been unable to get around how to make my dynamic and supportive classrooms linear. That was the real problem. I framed it wrong didn’t I. I should have been asking how do I make online learning dynamic and supportive. They didn’t really help me get my head around that when I did my diploma on distance and online learning. I think the problem was also I was trying to think about it as a linear series of videos and exercises.
Do you know I have tried many times to set up an online photography school. Each has failed.
So it is probably time I got it right. Writing weekly photography exercises taught me a lot about myself and the way I teach. I took that learning and realised I do have something very valuable to offer people while they are at home.
Len’s Club is primarily a community of learners, photographers and artists, whom all help and support each other in their personal learning journey. I have taken my classroom and moved it online. It is still a classroom, despite it being a virtual one. It still has a system, a scheme and is facilitated. It has lots of content to inspire and teach people, and has the mechanisms to adapt to individual needs and content is produced for the class, rather than to a set out dogmatic curriculum.
We have started with a founding membership to encourage you to join early. We are half way through that period and in eight days the price goes up and the offer goes away. It is good value because it is cheaper than what we will be offering others, and I will guarantee the same price for the lifetime of your subscription. If you stay with us, you pay the same price each quarter. If you leave, you join the masses and pay what ever the going rate is at that time. AUD$50 per quarter is good value in my opinion, and setting the prices has caused me no end of deliberation. In eight days that goes up to AUD$90 per quarter. I do encourage you to get in early.
Each day we release new content. Presentations, interviews, exercises, challenges, book reviews, tutorials, and introductions to photographers work you can use for inspiration. We have a closed community for posting and discussing photography. You have access to my expertise and my encouragement. It is the place that I would have wanted to study in, and the place that I want to continue my studies in. Somewhere supportive and encouraging.
If you are sitting at home, you have an amazing opportunity to create. It will take your mind off the horror that unfolds around us, and will help center you. Len’s Club is there to help you improve your photography and give you focus in a supportive community.
I urge you to consider subscribing now http://lensschool.com/subscribe
We also announced the Baily, Chinnery and Metcalf Abstract Photography Workshops for Australia. Obviously we can’t run them at the moment. But we wanted to let you know what we are planning and collect an interest list that we can open the bookings up before we make them public. Valda Bailey and Doug Chinnery and the United Kingdom’s leading abstract photographers and workshop leaders in this highly specialised area. We hope to bring them out in May 2021, and failing that we will go for May 2022.
You can read more about them here. https://www.lensschool.com/valda-bailey-doug-chinnery-metcalf-abstract-photography-workshops
Morning Mist is taken at Mount Wilson in The Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Photograph and text copyright © Len Metcalf 2020