4-Week Online Photography Workshop

Photo I
Photo I is the technical core of the curriculum, encompassing lectures, demonstrations, shooting assignments, and critiques. Students learn the mechanics of cameras and lenses as well as the components of exposure. Students are taught to be aware of the unique characteristics that light can take: direct, diffused, reflected, and tempered by atmosphere. In this course, students begin to understand the modern digital SLR and analyze digital capture’s pleasures (instant gratification) and pitfalls (generic, competent images). Every technique is practiced through individual assignments, which are critiqued by faculty and peers.

Emphasis is placed on: developing practical technical skills at handling modern digital SLR cameras and the ability to produce accurate exposures under a range of real-world conditions, developing a working ability to recognize and create dramatic exposures using natural light, and understanding the practical application of the components of exposure (sensitivity, aperture, shutter speed) under a wide variety of real-world shooting conditions.

Imaging I
This course is an intensive introduction to Adobe Lightroom Classic as a RAW digital editing and image library management system. Once immersed in Adobe Lightroom Classic, students acquire key digital darkroom techniques from nondestructive editing to unparalleled color and tonal control over an image. Students also learn the entire process of digital workflow, from RAW processing through output for advanced editing and web pages. Along with lectures and demonstrations, Imaging I allows students to practice and perfect their image-editing skills.

Vision and Style
This course teaches students critical thinking skills, and the visual language of photography, and pushes them to explore their personal interests in photography as they conceptualize, execute, refine, and critique. Students define and develop a personal, iconic visual style and specific area of interest, studying master bodies of work across many photographic genres. The primary focus is still photography. Students become familiar with principles of composition, color, editing, sequencing, and presentation through writing, journaling, research, and photographic assignments. Students gain the level of self-awareness necessary to understand the most important origins of their ideas and start to conceive how their work fits into the context of current photography practices and attitudes.

History of Photography
Intensive study, analysis, and critique of the work of master photographers, their techniques, aesthetics, and approaches help to equip students to choose the most effective means of realizing their own projects. In this course, the history of photography is studied from its beginning through to 1960. Students are guided to analyze the cultural and societal impact of photography and the evolution of the medium from the original assumed veracity of photographs to the exploitation of the viewer’s acceptance of the photograph as truth, given the use of modern photographic manipulation with tools such as Photoshop. Additionally, students become intimately familiar with a particular photographer’s body of work through written research projects. Discussion topics include composition, traditional and non-conventional framing, color theory, design, semiotics (signs and symbols), the effect of technological changes on photography, the use and limitations of photography as a documentary and personal record, and the surprisingly long history of using viewer assumptions to distort the truth.

The 4-Week Online Photography Workshop is a full-time workshop. To learn more, request information.