Businesses
Fundamentals of Photography
Taught by a contributing photographer for National Geographic magazine, this course will show you how pictures work and how to make them work for you. You’ll learn the basics of operating a camera and get dozens of practical tips to take your photography to the next level, illustrated with real-life examples. You’ll also learn about all the elements that come together to make a good picture and how they relate. After each lecture, you can complete the suggested homework assignments to help you put the principles of this course into practice, making them second nature.
Anyone interested in photography with any level of experience can benefit from this course. For those just starting out or thinking about upgrading their equipment, there’s an entire lecture devoted to researching and purchasing equipment. Instead of focusing on the bells and whistles of camera technology, you’ll see how to find just the right tool for the job at hand. You’ll learn the basic dials and buttons found on most cameras and how to use them to get the effects you want in your images. You’ll also learn how to choose the right equipment for different photographic situations.
The course covers the nuts and bolts of exposure: aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. You’ll see how these three elements affect the final image and when to vary what. Aperture and depth of field are critical concepts that are discussed in-depth. You’ll also learn to read an exposure histogram and find out what kind of exposure gives you the most flexibility.
The course’s twin centerpieces are in-depth, three-lecture discussions of composition and lighting. Both take you inside the thought processes of a professional photographer as he makes images. You will explore composition techniques, such as framing and the rule of thirds, that are easy to remember and apply and can be used with any kind of camera, from an advanced SLR to a simple point-and-shoot. You’ll discover how to make backgrounds work for you—rather than against you—and how to harness the power of
1
perspective in your images. The ultimate compositional goal—a layered image—can be achieved by combining and applying these principles.
Entire books have been written on photographic lighting, and there is a great deal of nuance to the subject; the basics, though, are simple. The lectures on lighting cover finding and getting the most out of natural light, recognizing how color and intensity affect your pictures, and using and controlling artificial light sources. You’ll also see how to use unconventional light sources to get great results.
This course features a number of on-location shoots to show you how a professional photographer thinks through a variety of real-life photographic situations. You’ll see field demonstrations that showcase photography of rural and urban landscapes, wildlife, people, special occasions, and travel. In the process, you’ll discover what makes an image look forced and posed and how to avoid those pitfalls to get a candid image that communicates something meaningful about your subject. You’ll learn to recognize, think through, and solve a variety of visual problems, from cluttered backgrounds to bad light.
The later lectures cover advanced topics and share professional methods for research and preparation, low-light photography, and macro photography. Proven journalistic techniques for research and preparation are presented— critical aspects of any photo project. You’ll also conquer macro photography and find out how to capture the tiny world that’s so often overlooked in pictures. Although low light poses a challenge, it’s also ripe with photographic opportunity, and you’ll discover how to spot and capture great images in low-light conditions.
To round out the fundamentals of photography, you’ll learn how to curate your own images. You’ll see a demonstration of digital workflow, with each of the steps in the process explained. You’ll also get practice in choosing the best image out of dozens or even hundreds of frames from one shoot. As a capstone, you’ll learn how to put together photographic stories and essays, moving beyond the individual still image to photographic narrative. ■
2