When: February 25th 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm

Cost: $75 per person

Course Objective: Upon successful completion of the course, participants will gain a basic understanding of photography fundamentals. Participants will learn when and how to change aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. They will also gain an understanding of how to critique an image in the interest of improving photography skills.

Course Outline:

Section 1: Understanding How Your Camera Works

• Parts of the Camera
• How an Image is Created
• The Light Triangle

Section 2: Camera Settings—Automatic and Assisted

• Portrait Mode
• Landscape Mode
• Aperture Priority Mode
• Shutter Priority Mode
• Using Built-In Flash

Section 3: Manual Camera Settings

• ISO
• Shutter Speed
• Aperture

Section 4: Composition

• Rule of Thirds
• Perspective
• Leading Lines
• Background

Section 5: Troubleshooting Activity

Space is limited, so be sure to register as soon as possible by emailing me at burghbaby (at) gmail.com.

When: February 25th 9:00 am to 1:00 pm

Cost: $75 per person

Course Objective: Upon successful completion of the course, participants will gain a basic understanding of photography fundamentals. Participants will learn when and how to change aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. They will also gain an understanding of how to critique an image in the interest of improving photography skills.

Course Outline:

Section 1: Understanding How Your Camera Works

• Parts of the Camera
• How an Image is Created
• The Light Triangle

Section 2: Camera Settings—Automatic and Assisted

• Portrait Mode
• Landscape Mode
• Aperture Priority Mode
• Shutter Priority Mode
• Using Built-In Flash

Section 3: Manual Camera Settings

• ISO
• Shutter Speed
• Aperture

Section 4: Composition

• Rule of Thirds
• Perspective
• Leading Lines
• Background

Section 5: Troubleshooting Activity

Space is limited, so be sure to register as soon as possible by emailing me at burghbaby (at) gmail.com.

However, every once in a while I take a photograph and think "DAMMIT! Why couldn't I have gotten that one right?" Often I just delete those ones and try to do better the next time around with the thought that you can't learn if you don't make mistakes. But every so often, I find a photo that I think is worth fixing.

Lesson learned: If you are taking photographs in a dark room lit with old lightbulbs and you go outside, you should probably adjust your shutter speed and white balance before you try taking another photograph. WHOOPS.

So the photograph is overexposed and the white balance is horrendous, but I liked it anyway. I could have messed around with it for a while until I corrected those issues, but instead I took what I think is the easy way out. I converted it to black and white. Here's two ways that could be done:

Using Lightroom:

I generally use Lightroom when I edit because it does a crazy good job, wasn't terribly expensive, and it's not impossible to figure out how to use it. The first thing I tried just because it does sometimes work, was to use the "Auto White Balance" button.

Sadly, the photo was too badly overexposed for that to really be useful. It was better, but not good enough. So...on to the black and white conversion.

There is an auto black and white conversion in Lightroom, but I find it leaves photos a little too muddy for my taste.

So instead I desaturated all of the colors myself. To do that, go to the Develop screen. Scroll down to the Colors box, select Saturation, and move the slider over to the left on each of the colors.

Better already! But, the strong shadows were bothering me and I felt like the photo could stand to be a bit crisper. To get where I wanted to be, I increased the Fill Light, increased the Blacks, increased the contrast, and increased the clarity. Then I did a couple of final steps. I increased the Sharpness and increased the Luminance.

MUCH BETTER.

I could have done even more to eliminate the shadow, but I was happy with where the photo was at the time.

But there's another way I could have done essentially the same thing. Since my goal was to improve the photo, not to try to make it perfect, I could have "cheated" and used Picnik.com to edit the photo. Three steps then.

1. Upload the photo.

2. Go to Edit > Effects > Black and White.

3. Go to Edit > Basic and adjust the Contrast, Sharpness, and Clarity.

The final result isn't as good as what I can do in Lightroom, but it might just be good enough depending on how I plan to use the photograph. I plan to print it for framing, so I'm going with the better Lightroom version.