Photography – Week 122
Related posts
Photography is Magic
I’m co-teaching a class this semester on digital photography with John Freyer. It’s aimed at undergraduate non-art majors and it’s blended. There will be lots of field trips and a chunk of online work. There is no particular camera required. Many of the students will be using phones but some have DSLRs. I’m building the companion site as we go but you can see it at http://photographyismagic.com/ and the work is out there on instagram under #phomag and the various challenge hashtags (#phomag_eat and #phomag_hunt so far). The work aggregates to challenge pages where the challenge is described. This is the #phomag_eats page. In the week one post, I make an attempt to show some of the value I find in online photography communities and at least sketch out a bit of the diversity you can find there. I highlight Flickr, Wikipedia, and National Geographic’s Your Shot. With Flickr, I do a bit better job showing how the data provided by their interface might help you figure out technical things about your camera and the photos you want to shoot. I’ve always found Flickr’s ability to make exif data public to be a really nice feature that may be passed over if you’re not looking for it. It’s been an educational resource for me as I moved from automatic settings […]
Photography with Faculty
I had the opportunity to work with Ryan Smith again recently. He’s been putting in serious work on on his website (Richmond Cemeteries) and is now turning a portion of that work into a book (Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries). Ryan came by to talk a bit about pictures for the book which led to a field trip (Hebrew Cemetery and Shockoe Street Cemetery) and I think some useful reflections on how the balance between technology, technical proficiency, and art works together to make something interesting. It’s a bit of rambling tour of a series of issues that are specific to this task (getting high quality images of grave markers for a book) but are also illustrative of larger things. Basic Considerations Light Light matters quite a bit. When we looked through Ryan’s initial photos many of them were taken in very bright light. That’s good in some scenarios but leads to really hard shadows. In any photo, thinking hard about where the light is and how it falls will be key in creating the image you want. Usually you want the light behind you. Usually you want it to be soft. I showed up a little before sunrise but I didn’t have a shot list and I’d never visited the site before. That led […]
Photography – Week 141 and 142
I wasn’t pleased enough to do a weekly post last week. I’m concentrating a bit more now and trying to get past my urge to rush to work that will be there if I take an extra ten or fifteen minutes.