Photography and anterior waxup course

 Recently I attended an anterior waxup course and photography course run by Szabi Hant, a technician from Perth who works with Tony Rontondo, a Brisbane based prosthodontist. Overall, I could tell he was a very knowledgeable and skilled technician but not the best lecturer and demonstrator. Over the two days, this manifested in different ways. 

The hands on component of the waxup course were him waxing up 3 anterior teeth on a stone model projected in a screen for the class. I think there was a lot of muscle memory involved and he proceeded through the waxup with some explanation as to what he was doing and important things to look out for but not much explanation in terms of finer aspects. For example, I would have been good to get his take on how to handle and manipulate wax and some more theory on instrument choices and wax types. To be fair, he made a valid point that the hands on component was the most important aspect of the course and the bulk of the time was spent on that, however, it could have been better guided. Most of the participants were trying to wax up at the same time he was demonstrating and not watching him do the waxup and I don't think that was beneficial. I learned most from watching how he handled the wax, the amount of wax he picked up every time and how deliberately he placed it.

The photography day had a lecture component and a practical component. He took us through some basics of exposure settings but then spent quite a bit of time going around the class and figuring out the correct camera settings  for each participant's camera to produce the right exposure. This is a challenge as everyone had different camera and flash brands and types, different camera models etc so he had to figure out the controls and camera exposure and flash settings that would produce a good image. This was a critical step but quite a lot of time was spent on each participant with the other participants not really benefiting from this time. I found it useful to follow him around see how he was testing the cameras and fiddling with the settings to improve the exposure and did get quite a bit from this. 

He set the camera settings to the recommended settings (shutter speed 1/200, ISO 100, aperture F22), then took a test photograph of a shade guide ensuring that the shade guide was held up with nothing behind it. He then brought up the camera histogram to see where the peaks are. If the peaks were towards the black then he put the flash compensation settings up so more light would fire out and vice versa when the peaks were too far to the right. For some of the  photos, the flash would reflect off the metal off the shade guide and trick the camera sensor into thinking there is too much light entering the camera and the software would overcompensate and produce a dark image. In my particular case, the image kept coming up underexposed and I turned the flash compensation to maximum (+2.0) with no change in the photo. He identified that I had probably already reached the maximum power of the flash which could be identified by the long recharge time of the flash capacitor. He then showed us white balance calibration

 The concepts were there and I have had a bit of background so got most of what he was saying but I can see how a complete beginner to photography wouldn't have any idea what was going on. Overall I got a few good tips on waxup and photography and will use them to get a new photography setup and take different types of photograps that will help my clinical side.

I will probably make some posts with some concepts from this course down the line probably more about photography because that is much easier to convey into words