rap battle

when something interesting happens during wednesdays’ modern photography lectures, we call it an anomaly. that is because on normal, uninteresting and predictable wednesdays, i get bored to tears during the aforesaid lecture. bored not because the content is uninspiring or dry, but the delivery, oh it’s the delivery – earnest, monotonous, barely surefooted. but today was different. today we had a rap battle.

here’s how it went: mc ‘da professor’ mei ting (it’s a guy by the way) spoke to us regarding our photography project which will require us to experiment with different depths of field when taking pictures. depth of field is primarily controlled by adjusting the size of the lens aperture and here a problem arose. in order to vary aperture size, one must own a camera with at least a degree of manual control. what most people have are ‘point and shoot’ models that are idiot proof (thank you, snoop ‘doggy’ dogg) and thus dispensing with the more advanced controls.

as da prof was muttering something about recreating the blur (shallow depth of field) in photoshop, an impeccably dressed young man, all pimped out like kanye west in his preppy pullover, offered a suggestion (let’s call him homeboy). he signaled da prof and next thing we knew, da prof had the projector jack yanked out of his laptop and plugged into that of the above-mentioned character. when i saw homeboy’s collection of pictures (with interesting blurred-out effects) on the screen, i initially thought that he was going to show us how to achieve those effects in photoshop. that was until i saw the word ‘lensbaby‘ in the title bar of the window and was about to go ‘what the &%#$!’ when someone in the back thankfully went, ‘but you need an slr camera to use that!’.

that was when things started to get really ridiculous. first of all, a lensbaby cost about as much as a compact camera. secondly, the lensbaby has got to be mounted onto a slr, without which that particular baby is helpless. thirdly, what was da prof thinking? homeboy was then interrupted by an indian chap from the photo/video society who looks like a totally not pimped out version of snoop ‘doggy’ dogg. he took the stage and explained that a large depth of field can be achieved by setting the shooting mode on compacts to ‘landscape’ and shallow depth of field with ‘portrait’, which is absolutely correct (bless his soul!). while this happened, homeboy was sitting in his chair, absolutely fuming. it’s no great loss, he was defeated by the master after all, whom he later labeled our ‘learned friend’. how obnoxious!

i can’t describe what happened next, because that was about the time i stomped out of the circus.

for more posts on my college life, click here.

‘you’re so bloody learned
you got pencils in your pants!’