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.