----- Original Message ----- From: "howard" : What is your target audience? (Yes, I know I should have asked that : first time round!) . As a Uni course for experienced photographers, or : experienced amateurs / semi-pros, your ideas look good, though I assume : you'll also include photographic techniques as they are affected by : digital cameras etc. Advanced diploma of science course. The students range in age from 17 to 50+ and were selected based on an interview and a portfolio. Students may have come straight from school, from other professions (many doctors, dentists, and police enrolled) as well as photographers who were trying to break into new areas. : For beginners (16 - 18 years old) it looks awfully complicated and not : much about photography. Certainly my students would be lost before : they'd even taken a photograph! The first year course used to be exclusively about film (no digital whatsoever) and worked with 35mm and B&W alone, now it's also supposed to include digital. While this looks all technical, there are other modules to the first year course as well, covering written assignments, materials and processes, pictorial assignments, basic sensitometry, properties of light, close up, etc etc.. many of the units are run concurrently so they'd be taking pics in one class, and not even see a camera in the next. the second year course moved into medium format, industrial photography, UV, IR, advanced sensitometry, colour chemistry and photography, microscopy, stereo & delved deeper into some of the first year stuff as well ass introducing them to 4x5, the studio, flash lighting and GN's. Digital photography begins, primarily it has dealt with practical applications only, with little underlying theory and spends time on scanning, photoshopping, printing & lets the students print on either RA4, b&w or digi The final year has the students working outside the college in industry, learning a great deal more about the 4x5 with specific assignments designed to test those abilities to the limit, a research project, an exhibition, much more intensive practical digital work and a lot more studio and product photography. It's a hard core course, but having also taught graphics, multimedia and film&TV students some of those same basics from first year, those who've gone on with the benefits of what they learned have told me afterwards they found the skills they learned invaluable (though they didn't at the time ;) Many didn't see the point of learning about circles of confusion, densitometry, formats and focal lengths etc saying 'but look, I take good pictures' (cameras set to auto everything, decisive moments being achieved on the light box) Now however those same students are telling me about DOP's who can't expose correctly & can't pick film stocks or order processing correctly, graphic designers laugh at competitors who don't understand colour shifts and mired values, multimedia students who delight in knowing what lighting effects to use, what 'focal lengths' to work with in their MM concoctions before they've even begun storyboarding. : So I work on a need to know practical : issues like extras (bigger cards, spare batteries!) exposure modes, use : of flash, setting ISOs and white balance, macro, general handling : techniques, simple use of photoshop. All bar the PS are already covered in the first unit, first semester - though shooting modes other than manual are actively discouraged. They all test their films too in an assignment to calculate the actual ISO's (Ilford AND Kodak standards ;) I smile watching them looking at film data sheets to see if the log exposure values stated are actual or relative, hounding reps for tungsten or discontinuous ISO's :-) : Researching our library (and the Internet if unavoidable), use of : software for saving, simple corrections (i.e. get the picture right : first if possible), printing and simple colour control if necessary. : After that, again, a need to know basis. Fair enough, different course are designed for different things - we also ran short courses for those seeking a guide to taking better pics. no densitometry, no mention of the square root of 2, but they were never popular courses in the college. : I count myself fairly well read, but have never found any relevance in : bar codes or algorithms in thinking about photography. bar codes in a historical perspective explain the AD process at it's rigin - it would allow students to gain a perspective on how a video camera became a still camera with images captured digitally rather than in video analogue, possibly even introducing them to the concept of taking analogue and digitising it! (scanners ;) : Yes, the latter : are involved in jpg compressions, but at the most you don't need to know : anything other than which is most suitable for the task in hand. Algorithms are 'procedures, and form the essence of how any digital image is handled right down to rotation - and some procedures are better than others, hence the advice often found 'work in tif, save in jpeg'. This comes from belief that jpegs are lossy in editing and stems from the fact that *Photoshop* has poor algorithms for handling jpegs, and the assumption that nothing else will do. In fact other programs CAN handle jpegs losslessly and do a fine job. Knowing that algorithms exist, knowing that they are at the *fundamental level* of how every filter, rotation, resize, drop shadow, mask, layer, scan process, capture-in-camera, write-to-file in camera etc etc works can lead the user to find maybe better processes, less intrusive or destructive processes, faster processes.. People will live with things that confront them without a thought unless they understand why the thing happens. Simply accepting something seems counter to the process of learning, and in a photography course it seems sensible to at least point out how such stuff works and why, even if it is not probed to a great depth. : More information would really be welcome, Karl - this is useful stimulus : in thinking about teaching and learning. I see digital as a HUGE step, with a massive learning curve beyond the likes of the basic chemistry, maths and physics that a student was expected to learn in film based photography. We're all new to this and we've all been asked by manufacturers to assume digital is 'straightforward', 'quick' and 'easy'. Heck, the sales guy selling a film camera never revealed the depth to which photography could be explored to mum & dad when selling them a film camera, people fuddled along until they found they needed to know more then they took courses, read books or experimented. If they couldn't be bothered they bought the autoeverything, got the minilab to print and accepted the shots that 'went wrong' as a simple fact of life. That's not to say one can't be a good photographer unless ones cleaned out an RA4 machine with bichromate bleach or worked out that aerating blix will make it last longer, there have been more good photographers that have never seen the inside of a darkroom than have. Those people often intuit their way, discovering things that do and do not work for them and their equipment and they've got by admirably. But if one is studying something should REALLY ensure that the end goal is knowledge. I've seen barely digi literates teaching non literates - 'turn the computer on, open photoshop, save your image and burn it to DVD' (student - turn.. on.. ? ) it's not so simple anymore. I'd like to see some myths blown away and a greater understanding making things easier for people. Once people know more and ask more questions of manufacturers, as was the case in past times, pressure will be felt and manufacturers will need to lift their game. It's not easy telling someone their data is irretrievable because they've relied on a sriped raid to archive images, or because they've run an unsafe browser without a firewall or AV and subsequently their data is trashed, or because they've relied on untested media which has corrupted. It's not easy telling someone PLEASE don't send me 6Mb tifs of aunty jane. It's not easy telling people that their camera is stoofed and I can't fix it. It's hard to comment positively on a flat, casted image hung in an exhibition. I'm expecting to see a few SD cards popping up soon for my attention after people 'upgrade' their cameras to models that use this media exclusively. Chatting to the guys at the wholesalers where I worked for a time they tell me SD cards have a high return rate and many problems - but they won't tell the customer that when he wants to blow thousands on a new model camera, why should they? They're only selling cameras to make money! : Thank you!
