For ART508 at the University of Northern Colorado in June, 2008 I concentrated on
The projects assigned were:
This is what I wrote in response to the instructor's questions about the class:
The greatest areas of learning occurred for me in the course of paying greater attention to cropping within the camera, using the least intrusive (i.e., the most subtle) PhotoShop techniques, and developing greater comfort with adjustments I seldom use, such as the channel mixers and modes other than gray scale and RGB. The week's work furthered my ability to work with my own artistic visions by increasing the quality of individual images I obtain to use in larger works. Simply, I think I’ve gained the ability to improve the quality of ingredients for my “real” work. It also seems more interesting to me to explore what I might be able to accomplish within the limits of a single, non-composite image.
There was also some benefit to looking at other approaches to specific assignments and to participating in discussions about my work and the work of others. It was helpful, too, to see the different kinds of results people obtained using different cameras.
My decision not to manipulate my photos in even the simplest ways required me to pay greater attention to what, exactly, happens before I snap an image. It was a matter of trying to pay as much attention to what happens before taking a picture as after.
Across the course of the week, I am not sure that I can claim that my images improved. The week passed quickly. Although most hours outside the classroom when I was not working on assignments, I was commuting, or sleeping, there just wasn’t enough time to shoot enough images for fresh material for each assignment. That I very much regret. I shot only about 2500 images during the week, a number insufficient to generate useful images for every project. So my portfolio contains some old images (not older than a few months, except in the case of the aspens, taken last fall) and, of the new ones, I’m not sure these have improved. A week wasn’t long enough for me.
My advice to someone considering the class would be to try to understand the type class it is and to begin, from the first day, to try to find images for each of the assignments. My unfamiliarity with my DSLR slowed things considerably this week and I did not use it for nearly as many images as I would have liked.