Teaching Photography

I have been teaching beginners a lot the past seven years whether formally at ACAD and SAIT, through seminars, or one-on-one. It recently came to me that I have been teaching photography all wrong. Well not ALL wrong, but I just realized I could do it better.

When I was taught French the first thing taught to me was conjugating the verb être (to be). That made no sense and took me several weeks to wrap my head around. I just wanted words. Words were the access point to French. Perhaps my penchant for new languages wasn't that high, but I knew that when children learned to speak, they learned one word at a time, usually nouns, so why they taught French verbs first, is beyond me. (I'm hoping that teaching method has changed.)

A parallel can be drawn with teaching photography. So many of the course outlines I have followed start with photographic theory like f-stops, shutter speeds, and optics and leave composition and lighting until late in the course. I think we should teach composition and lighting first. Isn't that why people are drawn to taking pictures in the first place, trying to find a way to capture those moments of time and light that they see? Of course I'm still a firm believer in all the technical aspects of photography as a way to create one's vision, but I'm going to approach teaching beginners in a whole new way from now on. Perhaps this will reduce the furrowed brows I encounter during the first couple of photo theory lessons. Access to photography is through composition and light, much like access to language is through words.

How do I know this will help my students? This past spring session at ACAD I started giving a weekly class assignment called Picture of the Week (POTW). Students were required to post one new photo during the week after each class to a web space for critiquing in the next class. The photo could be of anything that literally caught their eye. During class we critiqued everyone's new images. This had the benefit of getting students shooting without the constraints of a technical assignment, and learning to critique their own and other people's work.

When I got the evaluations back for that course, several of the students commented that the POTW was their favourite part of the course. They got to concentrate on composition and lighting and capturing the world around them without the boundaries of formal assignments. In effect they were learning the language of light and composition, which is the basis of photography.

The photo above was taken by Dat Tran in my ACAD PHTG 202 class of Spring 2008.

Canvas Prints for Sale Using PhotoShelter's New Embedded Gallery

The above gallery contains some photos of Alberta prairie scenes including Balzac and Rosebud using PhotoShelter's "embed gallery" feature. It is designed to take advantage of viral marketing as it allows anyone to grab the code and embed the slide show in any web page or blog. It is also possible to get a link for the gallery and email it to people or post it anywhere. This is great for introducing new work or for contacting clients directly with the edits from a shoot, as the link can travel easily to stakeholders. These galleries are also much nicer than the Photoshop web gallery option, as it allows full screen playback and it always links back to your PhotoShelter account.

This is a very good option for people who aren't web savvy, as they don't need to know any code, nor do they have to upload the files anywhere once the gallery is made. I know of several photographers who do not update their own web sites, so this is perfect for them.

To post a PhotoShelter gallery on a Blogger page follow these instructions:

• When writing a new post hit the "Edit Html" link on the top right side of the Blogger editing window.
  
• Then copy and paste the code from the web gallery (available by clicking the "grab embed code" triangle on the gallery's bottom right corner).
  
• Hit "Preview" in the Blogger window and the gallery should be there. Make sure you copy the embed code, not the URL code if you want the gallery to show like mine does above.
  
• If you want to paste a link somewhere, then take the URL code instead.

The "embed gallery" option is one of the many new features of PhotoShelter which make it a great choice for photographers showing, marketing and selling their work. PhotoShelter is striving to remain in the game, and is working hard at adding new features to help both photographers and clients buy and sell images.

UPDATE: This embedded gallery process is not as simple on WordPress.com blogs as it is on Blogger. WordPress.org (software download) self hosted blogs seem to work though, but you need to install a widget. Instructions are here, though it still seems to be a rather complicated process.