Welcome to Photo Tips and Good Things, the not so imaginatively named blog that I've created to be a companion to the photography classes that I teach.
I've been teaching photography since 2000. The first few classes I taught were undergraduate photography classes at the school where I received my Masters Degree, Virginia Commonwealth University. I taught basic usage of the camera, as well as how to make prints in a darkroom and how to cut and display them in mats. Some people assume that I am not old enough to remember the days of black and white film and the darkroom, but that's how I learned as an undergraduate at the University of Louisville and at VCU as a grad student. The digital revolution was just starting to impinge on the art and science of photography in 1999-2001 when I was studying at VCU, and we had a few Photoshop classes.
I remember how many of my colleagues and even myself fought against digital photography back then. Some people hate digital photography even now, in 2008 when that method of shooting has clearly taken over the world of film shooting. It is true that digital photography is less tactile, and there is nothing quite like the experience of working with prints and negatives in the darkroom. I still lament from time to time that I have nowhere to set up an old fashioned darkroom.
However, once I got to experience taking pictures with a digital camera, I was hooked. The immediacy of the process makes it much easier to do business, and it also allows you to know right away if you got the shot you were aiming for, or not. I traded my Nikon N80 SLR camera for a Nikon D70 digital SLR in 2005 and I have not looked back. I bought an iMac computer and the Adobe Creative Suite of programs, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator (a computer drawing program), InDesign (a page layout program) and Dreamweaver (a web design program) later that year, and I've spend all subsequent years using and trying to learn more about shooting digitally and using these computer programs.
Regardless of whether you've made the switch to digital photography or not, the world wide web and the internet contain a wealth of information about photography and how to master the use of your camera. Websites and links change so rapidly that I've never (until now) cobbled together a list of online resources for my students. It seemed that as soon as I typed up a handout with links to good sites, that it was out of date- one of the drawbacks of the digital age. There is definitely a very transient nature to technology these days. Products and equipment are out dated as soon as you buy them, but try not to let that discourage you.
I wanted to come up with a way to share links to good photo sites and also share images with my students online. I can easily change and update links by hosting this information online. I also find that I never have enough time to share everything that I'd like to share with my students during our classes. I show examples of my photography during classes, but students see the images only briefly. I wanted to put some my images on the internet so that my students could look at them more in depth, as well as obtain information about how each image was shot. For this purpose, I've created a flickr stream. Flickr is a photo sharing site that you can join for free, or for about $30.00 a year, you can purchase a "flickr pro" account, which allows you pretty much an unlimited amount of posting of photos.
So to sum up (I tend to be a somewhat verbose writer- my apologies), it is my hope to share information and photos and photo tips with this blog, and to share a more voluminous amount of photos over in my Huber Photo Classes flickr stream. Hopefully these sites can fill in some of the gaps that occur when I teach my classes, as well as share information with potential students and photo enthusiasts.
