~was better...but I'm still not enthused. He threw a lot of terminology at us--iso, f-stops, aperature--and talked about the relationship between them; some of that I had figured out, but it was helpful to hear it articulated. And then he talked about the difference between JPEG and RAW and told us we should shoot in RAW--because it's better. Come on, you must have a more well formed reason that that!
~What is missing is actually doing ANYTHING with our cameras. He has slides he uses to show us what HIS camera is like. But there is no real life application at all. No assignments to go out and take pictures with various settings and then we'll talk about them. Or anything like that, which I guess is what I was hoping for.
~I'm going to stick with this class because I paid for it, and get as much out of it as I can. But I have a hunch that I will still be looking for something more.
3 comments:
I was processing some pix last week from my trip to NC, which confirmed why RAW is so much better. I usually take RAW, but at my niece's birthday party I just went w/JPG because the pictures weren't intended to be good--just a record of the event. But then I wanted to send some to my family, and I realized that I really depend on a lot of the controls that I get from Camera Raw in CS3 (or even from Digital Photo Professional, which comes with the camera). Especially white balance. I love changing that after the fact.
I generally disagree that RAW is better--unless you know exactly what you want to do with the RAW files. The problem is that they take up a lot more space on your computer, and even though they let you change many more things, oftentimes people get lost with all the options.
I tend to tell my students to stick with JPEG shooting until they find that they have hit a wall with their editing. When they get to a point that they want to change something that they can't in JPEG, then we start to explore RAW. But starting with RAW is like tossing Dostoyevsky at a six-year old--it can be completely overwhelming and lead to unneeded frustration.
This is totally unsolicited advice, so feel free to ignore it--One of the first things I send my students out to do is to shoot with different f-stops--to get a sense of what depth-of-field is and how it can affect the look and feel of a photo. Perhaps that's something worth trying? Stick with one subject (a flower, or an insect or something) and starting with a wide aperture (2.8, 3.5 whatever your lens allows) and then trying a small aperture (11 or 16) and paying attention to the differences.
Sorry to hear this class is disappointing, I hope it gets better!
Your class sounds like mine. Now, I know I'm a demanding student, but our teacher didn't seem to have any agenda about what to teach us. And she kept asking us what we wanted to do the next week. We kept saying take pictures, learn about lighting and composition, learn about taking photos of moving subjects. She kept taking us to art shows and having us look (in an undirected way) at photos online. Ugh.
I just bought a book called composition by Fier. It gives a brief overview of stuff and then gives an assignment at the end. There's even a website you can participate in for feedback (although I'll probably use my 365 blog instead).
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