• Uncategorized

Photography 101 Seminar Pt 1 review

June 28, 2010 by Brad 

Before you utter “who does this guy think he is?” see this previous blog post for an explanation of the seminar.

What a great group! They arrived enthusiastic, and it just got better. By the end of our afternoon, they actually asked for homework, and were giddy when I came up with an assignment for them! Who could ask for better?

We covered the very basics of photography, zeroing in on the exposure triangle of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. There was a little bit of knob-twiddling, but the technical camera-specific how-to stuff was kept to a minimum for now. We all operated our cameras in full Manual mode today, indoors and out, and learned about how to create an optimum exposure without and with the camera’s light meter. I was really impressed with how quickly my three students picked up on the concepts. Their excellent questions spurred some really great conversation too. What may have been the most exciting part of the day was when we dabbled in straying from optimum exposure in favor of more creative exposure. I could really sense how empowered the three felt when they began to see how they were learning to make deliberate choices in how their images would look. They took their first steps from taking photos to making photos. It was so cool to see!

We actually created very few images today. Well, to tell the truth, I guided them through making a lot of poor exposures intentionally – letting them identify the problems, and letting them correct them using their new knowledge of shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and depth of field. Sadly, most of the images were either of me or the boring backyard. Here are a few that they created as we sat around the dining room table, using the cameras in full Manual mode:

Nicki captured Johnnie here, with a low-contrast background. We didn’t talk about composition today, but Nicki took some classes in film-based photography in college. It shows, as she used the Rule of Thirds to great effect here.

Nicki intentionally overexposed these tiki mugs, using (but outsmarting) the camera’s light meter, to keep the dominant backlighting from the window from making her real subject (the faces) from being too dark.

Caralie captured me going on and on about something against a challenging very contrasty background. She used a wide aperture to throw the yard out of focus, and then really nailed the right shutter speed keep me from underexposing. She balanced the darkness on the right with the other window light from the left very nicely via good shutter speed choice. (That dent in my forehead shows well in the sidelighting here. I ran into an iron stop-sign pole at full speed when I was five. Knocked me clean out.)

Caralie created this photo of Johnnie composing an image that stayed on her camera’s card and went home with her. Hopefully I’ll have some of her homework to show next week. In this image, Caralie used a shallow depth of field (via aperture choice) to isolate Johnnie’s face and the camera’s side from the background.

We didn’t set out to make any great art with our images today. We aimed at using none of the cameras’ automatic features and coming up with a properly exposed image anyway, with some deliberate choices about how the image’s background and subject would be captured. They all did great! Can’t wait to see what happens when we start getting into the creative stuff! These three are gonna be amazing!

Comments