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2nd Week of the Photography 101 Seminar

July 7, 2010 by Brad 

Below I’ve included a gallery of images from Week 2 of my first seminar on the basics of photography. The images range from examples of showing motion via longer shutter speeds, to students’ homework, to in-class creations. We had a great time, and every single attendee stayed late as we reviewed homework photos.

I was holding my hand up behind the orchids to give participants something with more detail than just the wall to throw out of focus. Apparently, my face was more useful from this angle.

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From this angle, the goal was to create a proper exposure with part of the orchid in focus and the fuzzy lampshade out of focus.

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Caralie was having so much fun with the f/1.8 lens that she couldn’t resist finding new ways to exploit the shallow depth of field. Here she isolates the clock against a shallow background.

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Johnnie captured Bethany in beautiful reflected light off the rug. I was so pleased with how Johnnie out-thought the camera’s meter to expose for her subject, letting the background blow-out (overexpose) intentionally. Taking it a step further, Bethany’s use of the camera was identified as the true subject of the photo by the use of focus and depth of field.

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Caralie captures an attentive Johnnie as I explain the virtues of solid camera support.

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Someone was listening to when we discussed composition and how showing flowers from angles people don’t usually see can create much more interesting photographs. I love this one! We gave it a little extra attention as we team-edited it in the digital darkroom.

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Good exposures of this still life scene were not easy. The hallway was not at all bright enough for no-brainer photography, and the seminar participants are are still required to operate their cameras in full manual mode.

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Nikki’s waving hand was a prop we used to practice conveying a sense of motion a few different ways. We’ll do more of this in later classes, particularly when we get into flash photography.

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Nikki nailed a beautiful exposure of this scene she spotted. Again, she was working in full manual mode, balancing the darkness on the right with window light from two different directions (left & behind). The highlight on the rim, with shadows that don’t lose detail on the (admittedly fancy) cup and the table’s wood grain combine for a beautiful scene of everyday items.

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1st Week’s HOMEWORK notables:

The shallow depth of field here, considering the lens they had to work with, was an impressive feat given the proximity of the ground to the top of the shoe. Sorry for the pun. Feat. Yeah, I’m a dork. That’s part of what makes the classes fun. (The dorkiness, not the puns.)

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Exposing for the shadows. Bam! Backlighting fun.

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Serious backlighting in manual mode. When you’re the one deciding every camera setting, something like this doesn’t just happen by accident. Well done.

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We all loved this original. Except Johnnie. She didn’t like the way her nose looked. (Oddly, we’d been waxing philosophic about the special nature of nose skin. It doesn’t sound fun in the re-telling, but there were laughs.) Anyway, I took the opportunity to illustrate a few things: 1) how over-exposure can be used to diminish subjets’ areas of sensitivity, 2) how high-key lighting can accentuate eyes & hair, 3) how adjustments in the digital darkroom (e.g. Adobe’s Lightroom, Apple’s Aperture, etc.) can be creative tools, and 4) the benefits of capturing files in RAW vs JPEG (yes, it’s geek-speak, but that’s why there are seminars, right?).

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Here, Caralie put into practice my admonition (borrowed from the great Scott Kelby) to give the subject’s gaze “a place to go”. I likened it to the dotted lines of vision one might see in a cartoon that show where a character is looking. If that’s too close to the edge of the photo, it will seem awkward. We didn’t discuss the Rule of Thirds, the Golden Ratio, or the Fibonacci Spiral until after these homework images were made.

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This is a re-edit of a photo that the students had deemed un-usable due to over-exposure. I don’t adhere to the saying that there’s no bad original, but sometimes there’s beauty to be coaxed out of an image that diverges far from what would be considered a “correct” exposure. It’s not perfect, even after we made changes in the digital darkroom, but it’s worth keeping now, and it serves to give us ideas on how to re-create this kind of feeling intentionally from the start, but with the ability to make it a little more pleasing next time.

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