Welcome to Course THREE! In the first two Modules you will gain a more professional-level understanding of the Design Elements that artists have used throughout history to create successful compositions. Arranging the Elements in ways that lead viewers through their compositions is an essential craft for photographers no matter whether their subject matter is pure documentary or vividly exotic personal expression. In Modules 3 & 4 we survey the essential elements of post-photography image management, using Adobe(tm) LIGHTROOM(tm). Image adjustment software designed for Smartphone photographers rounds out the Course. Since even photographers whose mainstay is a high-end DSLR also must admit to Smartphone use occasionally, and photographers who only use a Smartphone will usually admit that they want to step over to a "regular" camera at some point, there is something for everyone here! Let's get started with Module One!
MEET THE PROFESSORS: Peter Glendinning and Mark Sullivan
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Del curso dictado por Michigan State University
Principles of Photo Composition and Digital Image Post-Production
484 calificaciones
Michigan State University
484 calificaciones
Curso 3 de 5 en SpecializationPhotography Basics and Beyond: From Smartphone to DSLR
De la lección
Elements of Design: Building Blocks of Composition
A writer must understand what nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and other word forms are, before putting them together in sentences that make sense to a reader. Similarly, an artist must understand the essential elements of design that must be put together to create a composition that will "make sense" to a viewer of their artwork. In this first module you will learn about the Elements of Design so you can understand their functions and use them effectively to guide your viewers to the content you wish to be conveyed by your photographs, whether it be creative, or documentary, regardless of the subject matter.
Conoce a los instructores
Peter GlendinningProfessor
Art, Art History, & Design
Mark Valentine SullivanAssociate Professor
Music / Innovation Hub
[SOUND] >> It's time to meet the professors,
and I guess we'll start with me.
Well, here's a photograph that shows my Boy Scout merit badge
when I was 12-years-old.
I earned the merit badge in photography, and
also the merit badge in citizenship in the United States.
Those two things have been very important to me for my whole life, actually.
I went on to college at Syracuse University,
earned two bachelor's degrees, one in political science, that's one side of me,
and the other side in photo journalism, that's the other side.
After I graduated, I became a taxi driver in New York City to earn a living and
occupy myself while I was making photographs done in New York and
trying to figure out what to do next.
I went to law school, actually, after that and studied law for about two years and
then I decided the other side of my brain really wants me more than the left side,
so I walked over to the College of Visual & Performing Arts at Syracuse University
and started my studies in photography at the Masters Degree level.
In 1978, Michigan State University offered me a job, and now here I am teaching you.
My very first photo book was Edward Steichen's autobiography,
actually, A Life in Photography, published in 1963.
It was a really, really important thing for me.
This man was incredible in terms of the career that he had throughout so
many different iterations of that word, photography, and the profession.
Very much of an influence on me in terms of work ethic and approaching
photography as something you could do from a lot of different directions.
I'm either a dilettante or
a virtuoso, that'll be up to you to figure out and decide for yourself.
I read constantly and a lot of it is about photography.
And I've got a suggestion for you.
Go to L'Oeil de la Photographie, sign up, and
every morning you'll get an e-mail with some wonderful, amazing,
interesting news about photography from around the world.
I've had a career at Michigan State in the art department doing any number of things.
I published a book, actually Prentice Hall published my book, Color Photography.
I've created photographs for Fortune 100 companies, non-profits,
United Auto Workers, just about everybody.
And I've had exhibits in major museums and the tiniest of galleries.
You can learn a lot more about me at this website, which is the site for
the art department at Michigan State.
You can learn even more, if you care to, by going to peterglendinning.com.
And whether I'm photographing trees, or
photographing people, just about anything else,
my photographs are driven by a curiosity about what lies beneath the surface.
It can be expressed by showing the surface.
That's true whether I was making the official photograph for
the Governor of the State of Michigan, John Engler, which I did.
Or this portrait of a farm worker who
happens to be a Christian pastor on the weekends.
The highest honor that I've received professionally was being named
among the best of 2015 by the American Society for
Media Photographers for the series entitled, My Paris.
You can read a lengthy interview about me, and by me, and
of me, and learn more at this site.
ASMP is the premier advocate for photographers' copyrights and professional
practices throughout the world, and I recommend that you look them up, too.
The main thing I'd like you to know about me is that just like you,
there are times when I struggle to get control of my camera and
get in touch with what's essential so
I can make pictures that will convey the expressions that I feel are important.
I still consider myself a student, and I have a passion to create that keeps me
motivated to solve problems, and I'm sure you do, too.
It's a real privilege to be teaching you in this format.
Thank you for joining with us in this community of learners, and
for helping yourself and others grow throughout the course as
you contribute your photographs and your comments in our review sessions.
[MUSIC]
>> Hello, there.
I'm Mark Sullivan and I'll be one of the instructors of the course.
Before diving into the work on photography,
I want to give you a short overview of my own history as a photographer.
It's a bit of a winding history and has another unusual twist.
Over the last 25 years of my activity as a photographer, I've also been
a professional composer, writing music and teaching at a university.
The story starts in senior year of high school.
I borrowed my father's Yashica DSLR film camera and
started taking pictures around the St. Louis area where I lived.
That was the beginning.
Here are a few of the first shots from that year of photography.
This is a scene behind the restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher, and
was one of the first rolls of photograph I took when I was 17-years-old.
There are two other shots here.
One from the same location,
of a piece of farm equipment, which at the time I treated as an abstract.
The other is a shot in a parking lot, with some friends of mine,
that I tried to put into a kind of urban pose.
And then one final one from a few months later,
which is of one of those famous happenings in a city park.
I kept on taking photographs, and about six months later,
I went on a camping trip to Canada.
I took one photograph that, when I took it, I thought would be quite special.
But when I had the film developed and
looked at the negative, it actually didn't look so good.
Lots of dark areas and almost nothing visible.
It was until later when I saw it on a light table
that I realized what I thought when I took the shot was right.
It was something special.
When I a saw a convinced me that I wanted to keep taking photographs, and now,
45 years later, I still am.
After entering college I took photography courses for two years.
I learned how to use an SLR, a single-lens reflex, the predecessor of the current
DSLR, and I also learned how to use medium and large format cameras.
I love the dark room, spent many nights there developing negatives and printing.
There was no Internet and no social media for sharing,
so you usually had a few conversation with other photographers and among friends, and
maybe at some point you got an exhibition.
If you worked at it, you could get your work around, but
it wasn't anyways near as easy as it is nowadays.
I never dreamed the day would come when you could get your work out around
the world in a few minutes.
Not long after that, I got my first paying job as a photographer,
documenting a theater production at my college.
I was able to borrow a medium format film camera, a twin lens reflex Rolleiflex,
a wonderful camera, and I also borrowed an upperclassman's film camera, a Pentax SLR.
At this point everything was still done with film.
Photographing rehearsals and run-throughs of the play presented some new and
strikingly different challenges from taking shots of nature,
or shots in the street, or even in the studio.
Just to jump back to the present for a moment, I'd like to show some images from
that time that demonstrate something interesting.
Even in the beginning of your work, it's possible to take meaningful photographs.
For example, these two images here were shot
in the first two years of my work with photography.
About ten years ago I scanned them and posted them on social media.
Each has now received multiple thousands of visits and many,
many comments, many more than some of my most recent pictures.
So as you develop as a photographer you might create
works of high quality even though you're just beginning to learn.
And you'll notice that no matter how much experience you acquire,
each image you take will not always be a stunning, distinctive success.
After working for a couple of years, I returned to the university, but
this time to pursue another passion, music.
After completing two advanced degrees, for the next thirty years or
so, I developed a career as a music composer.
Through all this time, and
even when I became a professor, I continued taking photographs and
was able to integrate studying the work of a wide range of photographers and
photography not only into my free time, but also into courses I taught.
One, on art's relationship to society, and another and
interdisciplinary course on the arts in the Americas.
As an artist I also took part in a wide range of interdisciplinary projects
stretching across computer science, cybernetics, rhetoric, physics,
cinema, poetry, and, yes, photography.
And here and there, now and again, over and over, I found time for photography.
Another source of inspiration during this time came from travel.
During these three decades,
I had the chance to make several shooting trips to various parts of Puerto Rico,
to Portugal, to England and Austria, and in the last three years, to Cuba.
Travel is one way to inspire the desire to photograph.
Often, the lack of familiarity allows us to see with fresh eyes, and
notice things others ignore.
Taking time to create shooting tours while travelling was another way for
me to keep active as a photographer.
Various things happened that,
little by little, led me to become even more involved with photography.
I became increasingly involved with artists working across media,
some working in several media.
I worked with a film maker who was active as a photographer,
I worked with a rock musician who became a music photographer.
And, more importantly,
I began working with young people who went from a photography project to a film
project to a music project without any anxiety about who they were,
whether they were a photographer, or a film maker, or a composer.
I began to think there might be a fluid boundary for various kinds of art making.
I had the chance to get a phone scanner at this point.
And I spent about a year and
a half digitizing the negatives I had created over the last 25 years,
which I had kept in boxes, disorganized but mostly in good shape.
The process of digitizing these negatives not only forced me to organize them, but
it gave me a chance to look over all that I had done.
I was generally quite amazed and determined that I should find a way to
connect with the potential I saw there, and to begin afresh to create photographs.
Around this time, social networking exploded the range of contacts.
Suddenly, I began posting more and more.
Both my older work and
my current work were getting responses from an international audience.
This dynamic began to amplify and transform my work with [FOREIGN], and
the responses I received from many people in many walks of life encouraged me and
inspired me.
And that's still happening.
And now in recent years I've had the chance on several occasions
to teach photography courses at the university.
I enjoyed the teaching and the students and found the title even inspired me,
seeing with fresh eyes and a little experimentation.
Another exciting project involved each person making a photography book.
The results were amazing.
You'll have the chance at some point in the future to make a book, and
there may, at some point, be a course that allows you to do so.
In some ways, even though not as extensive or detailed,
the response to images posted on social media is like the response you get from
another person who views your photographs and tells you things about them.
Each of the images here has received more responses
then I ever could have dreamed of on social media.
And that goes to show that sometimes you might be
very surprised by which images resonate with other people.
Sometimes an image might resonate more with others than it does with you.
But we'll get to that later when we turn to looking at ways to
go about responding to photographs, both your own and those of others.
For now, let's say the history is up to date.
[MUSIC]
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