The Digital Photo DeCal is a course intended to introduce students to the world of photography. While previous semesters offered "basic" and "advanced" sections of the class, the format and curriculum for the Spring 2009 semester will be slightly different.
Advanced Theory: This class is similar to the "advanced" course offered the previous three semesters. The Theory class is aimed towards students at any level of photographic experience, and will build a foundation in photographic knowledge from the ground-up (so even if you're completely new to photography, that's fine!). The class will focus on building an understanding of the underlying science behind photography, and technical proficiency in using camera equipment.
Advanced Applications: This is a new class offered for the first time this semester - it can be thought of as an "advanced advanced" course that builds off of the principles and skills learned in the Advanced Theory (previously "advanced") class and applies them to real-world photography situations, rather than just experimenting with them for their own sake. The Advanced Theory class, or equivalent photographic knowledge, will be a prerequisite for this course.
Directory
-Sections
-Curriculum
-Class format
-Enrollment Information
-What kind of equipment do I need?
Theory class: Time, location to be determined
Applications class: Time, location to be determined
A detailed curriculum for both courses can be found on the schedule page. If you are interested in seeing lesson material from the Fall 2008 semester, see the Fall 2008 lesson materials in the archive.
The Theory course will be broken up into three general units - low light photography, lenses, and exposure/color. Material for the Applications course will be more open-ended and student-driven, but will vaguely focus on applications in portraits, sports photography, and photojournalism.
The first hour of the class is dedicated to a photo review of each week's photo assignment, allowing each student to present their photos and for other students to comment and critique them. It's also an opportunity to review any material from the lecture section.
The second hour of the class is the lecture, which will usually consist of an overview of the week's quiz and a presentation of the week's topic (mostly involving powerpoint lectures, and the occasional hands-on demo).
The "work" for the class will consist mainly of weekly quizzes (posted and answered online, answers reviewed in next lecture section) and weekly photo assignments (see the Fall 2008 lessons page for examples). To pass the class you will need to score a cumulative 50% on all of the quizzes and complete 75% of the assignments (rounded up to the nearest assignment).
The first hour or so of the class is dedicated to a photo review of each week's photo assignment, allowing each student to present their photos and for other students to comment and critique them.
The discussion/presentation session is a bit more open-ended and will vary from week to week. Most weeks will involve either an instructor lecture or student presentation on some chosen topic, or the occasional impromptu discussion on some subject which catches the class' attention.
"Work" for the class consists mostly of weekly photo assignments. In addition, students will also be required to choose, research, and make one presentation on a photographic topic of their choice. To pass the class you will need to complete 75% of the assignments and complete the presentation assignment.
While I'd like to allow as many students who are interested to join, I've learned from last semester that this just isn't a good idea - large classes become unwieldly, force the instruction into a lecture format, and are generally too intimidating and formal for good questions, discussion, and interaction. Therefore, the Advanced Theory class will be limited to about 20 students, and the Advanced Applications class will be limited to 10-15 students.
There will be a mandatory introductory meeting during the second week of classes, on Thursday, 2009 January 29 at 6pm in 293 Cory. You must attend this
meeting to enroll.
You will then need to fill out a short questionnaire/application. You can find the application at apply.php
What kind of equipment do I need?
I've received a few emails about this so I thought I'd address the issue here. An SLR camera will be required for the Advanced Applications, as most of the material will be SLR-specific. For the Advanced Theory class, I can't stress it enough: you do not need to run out and buy fancy equipment for this class. If you've got any kind of digital camera, you'll be good for this class. I will mostly be teaching the class from the perspective of a digital SLR user (digital SLRs are those monstrous bulky cameras with detachable lenses - like this) - some of the material won't apply to users with non-SLR cameras. However, any digital camera will suffice for the majority of the material and all of the assignments.
However, there are those of you who were planning on a new camera or equipment purchase anyway and have asked me for advice, so here it is:
My main philosphy behind a beginner camera is features and versatility first, and quality later. Many beginners get hyped up over high-end equipment - they start right away with the "professional" camera body and only want to use lenses that are "sharp". This is an expensive and detrimental trap to fall into - most of the features offered by higher-end camera bodies are of little use to most photography students, and only come into play if you're doing serious sports photography, or regularly taking out your camera to shoot in pouring rain as a photojournalist. The vast majority of photographers don't need it, and if you need it, you won't have to read a decal equipment recommendation guide to tell you so.
The best thing to do is to go after the camera setup with the greatest versatility - as someone learning photography, you want the greatest capability possible to experiment with different focal lengths, using large apertures, etc. Whether a lens is "sharp" or not does nothing to help you creatively. And as we'll talk about much later in the class, much of the "image quality" assessments of equipment are complete bullocks.
So what do I recommend? Grab the cheapest camera body available, since they all basically function the same and its the lenses that let you try different things and get creative. The short list of cheapest camera bodies on the market currently (in order of recommendation):
After you have the body of your choice, you have to decide on a lens. There are currently three ways to go (this applies to almost all systems) - use the cheap 18-55 kit lens, get a more versatile 18-135 or 18-200 lens, or get a larger aperture 17-50 f2.8 lens. The basic kit lens costs about $100 or so in most cases, while the 18-200 or 17-50 f2.8 lenses typically cost around $400. If you can afford it, I would go with one of the 18-200 or 17-50 f2.8 lenses, since this will afford you more versatility to learn with. However, the 18-55 kit lenses will function just fine, and may even be better since they'll save you money and you'll have a much better idea about what equipment you want after the course.
A second lens you may want to pick up is a large aperture prime lens, which will be either a 50mm f1.8 or 50mm f1.4 for the major systems. This will allow you to experiment with shallow depth of field, which is an extremely useful tool, and one of the main reasons to use an SLR camera rather than a smaller-sensored non-SLR camera. These are fairly cheap for most systems, running around as low as $80.
Lastly, another common question was - do I need any image editing software for this class? If you have a program like Photoshop, Lightroom, or Aperture, that's great. Otherwise, there are many free alternatives available online that we'll be using for the class, so there's no need to go out and buy software. If you happen to have a choice between a Windows or Mac OS computer, a lot of the free photography software available is only for Windows.