Photography   

In this Course, you will investigate and use your camera in the most creative mode, M (Manual). We will breakdown the functions of the camera that are manipulated to achieve properly exposed images including the Shutter, the Aperture, and the ISO. We will learn about the inter-relationships of the functions so that you will be able to select values of shutter speed, f-stop, and ISO which allow you to achieve the desired depth of field and motion capture. We will spend time talking about the most important aspect of photography, image composition. Impactful images are a combination of composition and camera craft. We will go on a class photo shoot where you will spend the session operating your camera in Manual mode, and applying some of the compositional techniques discussed. After the photoshoot, we will conduct an in-class critique of the images, using the opportunity to learn how to assess images for technical correctness and effective use of composition. We will spend time talking about lenses, why so many, why such a range of price, the crop factor impact, explain the limitation of lenses, which ones to use when. Finally, we will spend a session talking about lighting, how impactful it is, and some basic techniques and tools you can use to control it. A portable studio will be set up allowing you to work with lighting tools, seeing firsthand the effect of light manipulation.

Students will be required to bring cameras with interchangeable lens capability, and which allow the Shutter, the Aperture, and the ISO settings to be manually selected (Manual Mode). Having multiple lenses is not a requirement, but students are encouraged to bring all of the lenses they may have.

Capturing an image with your camera is only the first step to presenting amazing images to your audience. If you are not post-processing your images then your images are not all that they can be. In this course the instructor will introduce you to the basics of post-processing. This is a course to help you take a good image and make it a Wow! image. This is not about image fabrication and manipulation using a computer application. We will be introducing the basic concepts of image cropping and straightening, exposure adjustments, contrast control, local adjustments, white balance/color correction, burning and dodging.

This course will be using the Adobe Lightroom Classic (LrC) application. Lightroom Classic is the de facto standard for post processing used by the photography industry. LrC is available with the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography bundle, which also includes Photoshop and Lightroom (Lr) for tablets and portable devices. You will be introduced to the Lightroom workflow, learn about the Lightroom catalog and how to create one, import and store images in Lightroom, learn how to do global enhancements and localized or targeted enhancements, fix common problems, save images for posting to the Internet or passing on to other applications, how to color register your monitor, create panoramic images. The instructor will also show you how to integrate your camera directly to Lightroom using the Tethering function.

Students will be required to bring their own laptops, have Adobe Creative Cloud accounts already set up, and have Lightroom Classic (LrC) installed. Although this course was developed on and is presented using a Windows platform, students that will be working with Apple devices are welcome. All the functions in the Windows version are present in the Apple version, although some functions may be in slightly different locations.