You may have seen something about my Raleigh photography lessons either here or on facebook. Before I offered any classes, I had spoken at 2 photography conventions on business and lighting. Partly because of those speaking engagements, I had been asked by numerous people about offering a photography class out of my studio. After considering it for quite some time (over a year in fact), I finally came up with a course lesson and held my first photography 101 class in late March, 2012. With 5 students, we started the class with basic camera adjustment – shutter, aperture and ISO. At this point, the cameras got switched to manual and stayed there as we talked about metering, back lighting and some more advanced topics like TTL, composition, back lighting, etc.
At this point I think everyone’s head was really full so we moved to the shooting portion where we used both natural light, on camera AND off camera flash. This is where I stopped talking and everyone started shooting. When you’re talking about camera operation and light in theory, it’s easy to make the connections. When shooting though, many times that knowledge gets shortcut by the pressure of taking the shot, so this part of the class was really essential for us. I am very happy to announce everyone in the class did a truly fabulous job and 100% passed the challenge – get one shot of a backlit subject using a manual off camera flash – with only one shot! 5 photographers, 1 exposure each on a subject that is, honestly, pretty difficult. They really rocked the house on that shot!
As we ran late we decided to reconvene on another day and shoot in downtown Raleigh to practice what we’ve learned and put the natural light and flash techniques into practice. All future classes will be longer as I think the course material is perfect but want to allot more time to practice them.
I want to thank everyone who came out and give you my most sincere admiration in how far we progressed in just a few hours! Happy shooting! Here are a few photos of the class (with me in them) and lastly a shot taken with (gasp) on-camera direct flash. That was just one of the techniques we learned in class. Hope to see you at the next one!
