I’ve been teaching photography in various classes since graduate school in the 1970s. It has changed a lot since then, and it has stayed the same. I’m most interested in the part that has stayed the same.
No matter whether it’s digital or film, no matter whether it’s a point-and-shoot or single-lens reflex, we still have to compose the picture and choose the instant to press the button. When it comes to my new Visual Communication class, it’s this process that I most want to teach, and I believe for beginning photographers it’ll be simpler to eliminate as much of the technical side as possible.
One of my favorite assignments in a grad school photo class was to construct and use a pinhole camera. As I recall, we used a cardboard box and the “lens” was a thin disc of soft metal with a tiny hole punched in it using a needle. We put 4- by 5-inch negative film into place in the back of the box (in a darkroom, of course), sealed the small box shut so it would be light-safe, and covered the pinhole with tape. By trial and error, we learned the proper length of exposure, and we took a lot of interesting pictures. The point of the exercise was that photographic equipment doesn’t have to be complicated. At the same time, we were being encouraged to visualize a shot before we made it, without even having the benefit of a viewfinder.
I don’t intend to make students in my new Visual Communication class make pinhole cameras, but I do want them to concentrate on the outcome, and not the process, as much as possible. So we’ll use the same Kodak Zi8 video cameras that we have bought for learning video. These small devices look like cell phones and can be used to take still photographs. We’ll use Photoshop or Google’s Picassa to learn about pixels and resolution, and we’ll create slideshows to learn about how a group of photographs can work together to tell the story of an event.
We’ll talk about visual variety. By that I mean how it’s the photographer’s job to think about variety in terms of the types of subjects, whether the photo is horizontal or vertical, whether it’s a close-up, medium shot, or an overall shot. Overall shots set the scene. Medium shots tell the story, and close-ups add drama or detail. A series of medium shots tends to be boring, because the subjects’ size and framing are similar. A combination of overall, medium and close-up shots – along with a variety of subjects – will work to tell the bigger story and be more visually interesting.
Since our cameras have only crummy digital zooms, we will zoom with our feet. For overall shots, we’ll have to walk away to a distance that allows us to include as much of the scene as possible. For medium shots, we’ll have to control the distance to emphasize the subject and crop out unnecessary parts of the scene. For close-ups, we’ll have to be a foot or so away. But taking the photo will be as simple as composing on the LCD screen and pressing the big red button while holding the camera still.
When I’ve taught layout and design from a newspaper/magazine standpoint for the past several decades, I’ve always included a unit in photography. Mostly, that involved studying examples of photographs for the qualities that made them successful, and then structuring assignments where students used sets of photographs to do photo layouts. The aim was never to make them photographers. I wanted to teach them how to use photos made by others. The idea was to make them aware of what a photographer goes through to take a picture, and to give them the ability as an editor to be part of the conversation on projects involving a team of photographers, writers, designers, and other editors.
This new class will have to go a step further, to teach them basic skills so that they can be cross-trained at using a camera to capture still photographs to accompany multimedia stories. As they go on to more advanced classes in our curriculum, or work on the student newspaper, they’ll have opportunities to use more sophisticated equipment. Students today need this sort of cross-training to produce content for the web; they often won’t be depending on someone else to press the button.
The other helpful aspect of this unit on photography is that it can be a natural bridge into the more complex process of shooting and editing video. Video adds the problems of motion and sound, but much of the visual aspect is the same as still photography: looking for variety in subjects and using overall, medium and close-up shots, for instance.
If you’re an educator, how do you use still photography in your visual communication classes?
Next blog: Creating slide shows
