Photo Class

Once we got a DSLR camera, it rapidly became clear that while it's possible to treat such a camera as just a fancy point-and-shoot, that really wouldn't be making the most of its potential. Fortunately, we found that Durham Tech offers a series of digital photography classes. Initially we signed up for the “Beyond the Basics” class but after the first session it became very clear that the basics were beyond us rather than vice versa — so we switched to the “Basics of Digital Photography” class and continued with it.

The class just completed this past Monday. I've learned a lot from it, both in terms of how to use the various bells and whistles on this camera, as well as how to take better pictures in general. (The pictures in our Easter post are an early product of that education.) Each week we've had photo assignments to get hands-on experience with various features and techniques — aperture settings to control depth of field, shutter speeds to blur or freeze motion, the effect of wide angle versus telephoto, and so forth. Basic, perhaps, but surprisingly helpful. For example:



Shutter speed: 1/640s versus 1/20s


In addition to weekly classroom sessions and homework assignments, the class included a weekend afternoon photo outing to the Duke Gardens. We were given three hours and about a dozen photo assignments to complete, along the lines of “Take pictures of the same subject at the same distance, but vary from maximum wide-angle to maximum telephoto on your lens” and “Take a picture that has only two colors.” While working to complete these assignments, I came up with a few photos that I'm somewhat proud of:




Even though the class focused primarily on DSLRs and all their various manual settings, it'll definitely help me in taking better pictures with our everyday point-and-shoot camera as well. I'm thinking about taking the “Beyond the Basics” class this fall, time permitting, since (as is often the case) by learning this much, I've become very aware of how much more there still is to learn!