Photo I: A Seven Week Class

What Will I Learn in Photo I?

Take advantage of our free camera-buying service, so when you do buy a camera, you make an informed decision. We include Photographic Thinking in all of our classes (no extra charge, LOL).

Richard Stromberg

Photo I is a comprehensive class about the fundamentals of photography. You will attend once a week for class and once a week for computer lab. While digital imaging is new to photography, "digital" refers only to the way the image is captured and stored. Digital chips replace film. Most of the other facets of photography are more than 150 years old.

In Photo I, you will learn about correct exposure, what makes the "right exposure" and why. You'll discover the meaning of shutter speeds and f-stops and how to stop motion or let a "subject's motion" blur in just the right way. You will also learn about depth of field: how much of the picture you should have in focus and how to use "out of focus" in just the right way.

In the Lab, you will learn the right way to burn a DVD to save your images permanently. Also in the Lab, you will learn how to convert your color images to black & white and how to print using a high-quality, archival inkjet printer. The computer program we use to manipulate photographs is called Adobe LightRoom. It is a program you can afford, and it is much less complicated than Photoshop.

Photo I does not teach Photoshop. In the Lab, there is at least one teacher for every five students/computers.

In Photo I, you will also learn about composition for photography and ways to approach the "critique" of photographs - your own and the work of others.

One of the many unique features of Photo I is Richard's distinctive three-week assignment, "The Psychological Relationship Between the Subject and the Photographer." Richard created this assignment in 1970 and has spent 40 years with more than 25,000 students fine-tuning the principles and critique. (All other versions of this assignment are shallow imitations of the real deal.) This assignment will teach you about ethics and law in photography and about the subtleties of what happens when you point a camera at someone or someone points a camera at you.

Each week, you'll get a "shooting" assignment, and in each Lab, a corresponding "print" assignment.

After completing Photo I, each student who attended all of the classes and Labs should be able to reliably photograph and print with success and confidence.

Photo I lays the proper foundation for the more technical Photo II and Photo III classes.

As always – Laughter Will Be Heard  &  Learning Will Occur. ;-)