Introduction to Photography

Get more out of your selfie.

  • Course Length: 3 weeks
  • Course Type: Short Course
  • Category:
    • Life Skills
    • Technology and Computer Science
    • Middle School
    • High School

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Photography seems to be an art form everyone and his or her great grandparent is into these days. From photographing (and posting) what we eat for breakfast to capturing every movement of some distant cousin's baby's first five months, many of us have jumped on the point-and-click bandwagon.

Selfies included.

But…do you every feel like, deep down, you're missing something? That your pointing and clicking isn't scratching the surface of what photography really is? Does posting smartphone-ready pics of your kimchi taco fill you with less satisfaction than it should? Do you wish you could use big words like "saturation" and "composition" without feeling a little...croppy and underexposed deep inside?

Photography is an art form, but it's also an in-demand skill in the modern world. With increased photog skills, you can:

  • make your website sizzle and get rid of the stock photography from Shutterstock
  • make someone else's website look like an HTML5 paradise.
  • create a portfolio and farm yourself out to your school newspaper, the bloggers and gossips, killer music festivals, or…Shutterstock.

This is a crash course in photography. In fifteen lessons, using research, exploration, presentation, and written reflection, along with tons of individual photo-taking opportunities, students will be able to talk fluently about how they chose their photographic subjects, how they posed and framed their subjects, how they transformed images into exciting artistic statements, and how they set out on the road committed to photo-document our ever-shrinking glaciers.

(Or just be better at editing their selfies.)


Unit Breakdown

1 Introduction to Photography - Introduction to Photography

This course will focus on composition (framing, lighting, balance), DSLR basics, and the fundamentals of using photo editing equipment. By the end of these fifteen lessons you'll have some amazing photos to show off to your peeps—and some less-than-amazing ones that were essential parts of the learning process.


Sample Lesson - Introduction

Lesson 1.02: Lighting

Without good lighting, everything is terrible.

Everything. Not kidding. Photography is a visual medium, so if we're not taking the time to light our subject properly, we're not only committing creative suicide, we're also being jerks. Unless we're intentionally trying to hide someone's identity or doing silhouette stuff for cool artsy reasons, we should light up our dang subject. He, she, or it is the reason people are looking at the photo, so let's just do them all the courtesy of showing what we're trying to show them.

"Does this picture make me look fat?"
(Source)

There's also a technical reason behind having good lighting: when there isn't enough light in a photo, it dissolves into pixels and noise.

If we're going for an old-fashioned effect or something, all this fuzzy stuff can be okay, but we should keep in mind we can always add in effects like this post-production—and we might end up changing our mind about them later.

Unless we know exactly what we want before shooting, it's usually best to start out with good lighting and crispness in a photo and do all the cool crazy edits after the fact. It's the difference between painting on a spotless white canvas and trying to do the same thing on one that's covered with dirt marks and smudges from hundreds of people picking it up and putting it back on the shelf at Michael's. We wouldn't even buy the second one, because ewww.


Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.02a: Good Lighting

There are two extremes you can hit in photography when it comes to lighting: overexposed and underexposed.

  • Overexposed means having too much light. Or being a Kardashian.
  • Underexposed means having—you guessed it—not enough light.

Both are headache-inducing for similar reasons: When there's too much light flooding a photo, we lose information in the bright spots, and when a photo's underexposed, we lose detail in the shadows. So instead of looking like an actual thing we could pick up or touch, our subject just looks like a big pile of unreal, unattractive, two-dimensional nope.

Here's an example of a photograph with tons of overexposure. Depending on the photographer's intent (part of the Creative Why) and ability, the photograph is either really mysterious or a bit rude. There's so little detail in the bright parts of the photo that we can only just tell she's looking out of a window. This is an extreme case of overexposure. Sometimes it's best not to head to the light at the end of the tunnel.

The next photograph illustrating exposure is a cute little cupcake all by its lonesome self on a plate:


Some cupcakes just need a little personal space, amirite? 

For our course photographer, the cupcake turned out to be really hard to light, because it has a huge range of lights and darks—the dark cake and the white frosting, all on a very light-colored plate.

If you're in automatic land on your camera, your camera will make adjustments if a photo is really light or really dark, but if it has elements of both, you run the risk of the photo being over- or underexposed. In the cupcake photo, our photographer managed to make it all work, although the cake part is a little overly dark. The highlights in the frosting were the priority, because there's way more interesting textural stuff going on there. If this thing had been overexposed, we would have lost out on the detail of the flecks in the frosting.

As long as we're not losing too much information in the highlights or shadows, we're good. Make sure to check photos immediately after taking them; sometimes our cameras can go rogue on us and do weird things we weren't expecting, and we might need to change the mode we're shooting in to better match what we want to shoot. More on specific camera functions and stuff coming up next week.


Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.02b: Natural vs. Controlled Lighting

This is a matter of location and availability of natural light. Most photographers aren't like, "OMG yay, I get to use my flash," because natural light generally looks better. But sometimes we don't really have a choice.

When it comes to flash, here's the main thing: be careful. Flash has the bad reputation of washing people out and casting gross shadows behind them where there shouldn't be any. We need to watch out where we're taking the photo, too. If there's a wall directly behind our subject, we should move our subject—unless we really want to deal with all that craziness in post-production clean-up. We don't want to, really.

Again, though, the way we light our subject is up to us. We may want to use a really soft external flash (we'll get to that later) on our subjects outside to make them look like they're glowing in the middle of a forest. Or put a flash behind them to make a super surreal silhouette. There are tons of creative things we can do with artificial lighting. We just need to make sure we're doing them with a purpose in mind. Also, it's good to get comfortable with natural light before we start living the flashy life.


Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.02c: Harsh vs. Soft Lighting

The type of lighting on our subject can change the entire feel of a photo.

Here's a photo snapped by our course photographer, which shows the harsh black, white, and gray of life (and some seriously harsh eyeball action):


"If I concentrate hard enough, I can move objects with my mind." 

This photo is Carrie-level creepy, and we have the lighting to thank for that. The photographer actually took it in a Starbucks around noon, so there was bright sunlight flooding in through the window behind her and relative darkness behind the subject. The contrast was extremely stark to begin with. The contrast, combined with the subject's expression and nearly white irises, probably makes you want to run and hide under a table. Sorry.

It's okay—you can come out from under the table now. The next photograph taken by our photographer will give you hope and peace:


"Yo, have you seen Elrond?" 

The blurry hint of nature in the background helps with that, but so does the lighting. Cloudy skies typically soften and disperse light, making it easier on the eyes. The fog in the background also adds another layer of softness, catching the light and making the backdrop fade away.

Weather is cool like that: it does stuff to light. Everything here is smooth and nice and pretty.

We need to pay close attention to the weather conditions, time of day, and scenery if we're going outside.

If we're staying inside, we have to look at the available light we have and make sure it works for the shot we're going for. Candles, lamps, and fluorescent lighting can make the same subject look totally different, so we need to choose wisely. It can be the difference between a photo advertising a fantasy epic love story and one scaring you out of your mind.


Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.02d: Angles of Light

Light is a funny thing. It can be seen as a particle or a wave, for example. Also, depending on its source, light comes rushing in at different angles.

This photo by our course photographer shows how angle of light can be used to our advantage:


Eternal sunshine of the halfway-illuminated face.

To take this interesting shot, which relies on angle of light for its effect, our photographer stood in bright sunlight with the subject. Our photographer noticed that part of the staircase was shadowy. The photographer took initiative and asked the subject to move so that half of her face was in the sunlight, with the rest in the shadows. This ran the risk of the photo getting washed out, but mad skills saved the shot. 

Lesson: we need to trust our instincts and not be afraid to experiment. That includes using angles of light to do weird things to our subjects, no matter how confused we make them.


Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.02a: Lighting Lab

We're going to take our cameras out for this one!

We'd like you to choose either a natural (probably outdoor) or controlled (probably indoor) lighting situation. Get your camera out and don't worry too much about all of the settings.

Instead, pay attention to how the light is working in that particular occasion. Is it near the golden hours? Is it midday? Are there any weird patterns that light is making on an object? Study the world around you. Find something interesting. Then complete the rest of this activity.

Step One:

Once you've found a subject to your liking, something that has interesting lighting, take a photograph. You'll need to save this photograph to your computer and paste it into a Word document.

Step Two:

In the same Word document, answer the following questions:

  • Where does the light hit the object?
  • What kind of light is hitting it?
  • What does the softness or harshness of the light add to the photo?

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.02b: Spin the Camera

This one's for fun. Just be careful you don't get vertigo. No one wants to pick a photographer up off the ground, surrounded by broken camera bits.

Step One:

While indoors, find a light source and get near it.

We all know what a selfie is, so get your camera in selfie position, and spin in a circle taking photos.

Spin-click. Spin-click. Spin-click.

What's cool is that you'll get drastically different images each time. It'll give you a feel for the way the highlights and shadows on a face change with different angles of light, and as a bonus you can laugh at how dumb you looked spinning in circles next to a lamp.

Upload five or six of the photographs that show different lighting patterns.