Teaching Digital Photography as a short elective at Espoo International School.

3 x 45 min

I have been teaching Digital photography at Espoo International School since August 2012, and I would like to demonstrate my teaching practice for the last three lessons in May 2014.

During the year students have covered many different technical aspects of digital photography such as aperture, shutter speed, exposures, editing in Corel PaintShop Pro. We have also looked at themes of portraiture, lighting, elements of composition, landscape photography and during this last few lessons I wanted to explore the idea of merging different exposures.

Lesson on the 5.05.2014 ( 45 min )

Objective of the lesson

Give students an overview of the importance of a wide range of tones in a scene and an understanding of high dynamic range photography (HDR). Recap on the use of shutter speed and its importance in determining exposure.

In the first part of the lesson I showed students a video that I thought would give them an introductions to this topic and at the same time show how the exposures are blended in Corel PaintShop Pro X2.

After the video we discussed the topic and how much was understood, I asked questions related to their previous knowledge: What is exposure ? How to create an underexposed image and what role shutter speed plays in this ?

The material that I prepared for the lesson can see here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-hCn_983CnuaUxOd0k0Z0ZaeEE/edit?usp=sharing

This was followed by a practical exercise where students went outside to take images. In the last few lessons we were taking images of landscapes and I asked them to focus on landscape for this particular exercise as well. This did not work so well with some students who wanted to take images of other students or action photos. As we had to work with adjusting the shutter speed I decided to allow some flexibility and give some of the students an option to work on a series of action shots as a shutter speed exercise.

Lesson on the 12.05.2014 ( 45 min)

The objective of this lesson was to look at the student's images that were taken in the previous lesson with the different exposures and merge them in Corel PaintShop Pro X2 using a feature called HDR Exposure Merge. Most of the students were able to take images with varied exposures but some of the images did not line up perfectly so there was a slight blurring effect in the final merge. 

We have only couple of tripods in the school so it was not possible for everyone to use the tripod and have perfectly aligned images. I decided to repeat the exercise,  and this time the students who were not able to get good images were using tripod and making sure the images were aligned.

Overall I think that this exercise went well and the students were able to understand the importance of holding the camera still.

Some feedback from students :

http://padlet.com/wall/4hsnxde88hfn

Some exercises with shutter speed and HDR merge: 

HDR Merge example with the use of tripod: