: 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 I think I failed to stress something in what I wrote. I have the utmost respect and admiration for people who *intuit* things and I think they're lucky and skilled in a way we sometimes don't think of 'skilled' I place (rightly or wrongly) many pictorial photographers in this category. Many of who know nothing of circles of confusion, nodal points in lenses, etc etc.. but who DO know how to make astonishing images. Take the example of driving a car fast around a corner, whether the tyres keep traction or lose it - the driver accommodates, correcting and completing that manoeuvre. calculating all the forces and vectors, the physics involved in taking a real, actual car around a sharp corner - now there's a HUGE amount of information to calculate, rarely would all the figures be worked into anything so complex. Usually we work with amorphous blobs of matter of unspecified sizes to allow simpler calculations, but torsion bars, suspension components, neoprene bushes all doing their things, kingpins flexing, chassis twist - THAT'S complex! Friction is still a bit of an engineering black art and involves many observatons, modifications, sub calculations and rectifications. Calculating the minute angular variations to maintain the shifting mass and forces at play, the slight change in power application.. massive task yet the average driver can manage this without a *conscious* thought. marvellous. Yet this task is a 'user' task and apparently requires no calculations and occurs millions of times in millions of places every day. But let's say you want to design a particular unusual vehicle for use in a particular way without having the opportunity to test and learn to drive this vehicle in advance - you'd need to study quite a bit before attempting such a feat, and you'd want to be pretty certain. You would need to become a student of such things Were one to be a student to learn this goal then whether one can actually drive a car or not is irrelevant. Were a photographer who'd only ever taken candid street snaps chosen to undertake the task of digitising a library then they'd need to learn more than they may already know.. and it might benefit them greatly to learn the fastest, cleanest and most efficient methods of achieving this goal. They could stumble along slowly, find a technique that sort of works and hope that it continues to work, learning snippets from whoever did the task before.. or they could undertake study specifically designed to aid in this task, or they could learn as much as possible about photography - each is appropriate depending on what one wants. .. I met a brick paver doing quotes. He really didn't *understand* basic math even though he'd been quoting and laying paving for some 15 years. His method of working out the area of a rectangle was to add A+A + B+B (!) He obviously knew some basic math, but he'd failed to understand that the 'times tables' he was supposed to learn in grade 1 at school were in fact *area calculations* I knew many other pavers who could cast an eye over the most irregular areas and be accurate to within 2% of the total! for them it was a combination of experience and intuition. they were a joy to watch :-) I in *NO* way would diminish accomplished photographers who know nothing of underlying theories, nor did I ever make disparaging remarks to students on the quest for knowledge, nor would I offer anything bar support to mums and dads who are trying to make good pics of the kids.. but if I were charged with the task of teaching digital photography then I'd feel amiss if I did not teach to an appropriate depth that would allow students to at least know *OF* the fundamentals, thus allowing them to refer to these and extrapolate to new areas as needed. To tell the truth I actually declined to teach digital when first asked as I found the area too huge, too deep, to ambiguous, too expansive, too overwhelming and I really honestly didn't feel I knew it anywhere near enough to be able to teach it. Oh - found out something new today from a graphic designer - Photoshop may not only embed a picture within a picture, but apparently it may embed up to *three* icluding an icon, a preview and a browser preview, and apparently 'save for web' may not strip these out depending on the version and settings! well worth stipping! ;) He also made mention of the fact that previously saved images will be resaved and recompressed (losing quality) when PS is used to strip formerly unstripped images and expressed interest in a post photoshop stripper.. he's a mac user, so if any mac users out there can suggest something.. ? k
