What's important in photo course

[triblett_lungre_thurd]

ya got me thinkin' Doug...

 

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I tried to remember my favorite class from back when... why and how

it affects me and my work now.

 

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it was b&w 1...

 

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My teacher forced us to use fiber and learn to mount them properly...

and just that tiniest bit of nitpicky-ness over quality, dry to dry,

seems to have lasted me. Our first lesson was to watch him do it from

exposing to drying the print and not just ponder the end result on his

office wall. He explained why he was rating his plus-x at 90 to why

he wanted us to use a single weight fiber.

 

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you may not have the equipment to do this for them and these days with

good rc materials you won't need to necessarily... but like everyone

above intimates... show them how to make one, just one fine print and

they'll start asking questions like we do around here and the rest

will be fun and easy.

[david_kirk1]

Irrespective of how advanced the class is, send them out with a 35mm

camera and atleast one roll of slide film. They need only set camera

on auto and the lens to f8. On their return get the films processed

(if the college has an in-house lab) and returned to them preferably

the morning after. Next get them to mount 6 of their favourites from

their roll for projection. Get them to talk about why they took that

photo and what they would do to improve it and why.

After this get them to shoot the following(again 35mm for now) 2x

selective depth of field 2x extended DoF, 1x object on tele lens, 1x

object, the same size on a wide angle, 2x panning, 2x high key, 2x lo-

key 2x high contrast 2x composition.

The above suggestion is an extract from thr camera techniques

module I did in college.

Other things to show them can be basic portraiture and B+W

processing and printing.

[cmc]

you can only learn so much in the classroom. but i found that

looking at bookstores and seeing photographer monographs

were very helpful. this is not the case of all teachers, but if they're

teaching full-time, 90% of the time its because they aren't good

enough to be full time photographers. so why would you want to

listen to everything they say? unless you want to become a

teacher like them, go for it. if not, then go out and just shoot. you'll

learn more that way.