This comes from a recent thread on the merits of zoom lenses. I admit the last time I seriously taught anyone photography, full automation meant matching the needle and circle in a Minolta SRT-101. My question is, is it better to learn the separate concepts of focus, focal length, exposure- f/#s and shutter speed, et al. Or is the student better served by automating everything, having a zoom to choose focal lengths, and concentrating mostly on lighting, composition, and images? The technical details can be learned later and as necessary. Do you like a steep, challanging, rich learnign curve, or do you like to take it slowly and methodically? Should we start with B&W or color? I'm curious about thoughs from both people learning, and people teaching.

-- Conrad Hoffman (choffman@rpa.net), December 02, 1999

Answers

Over the years as I worked as chief photographer for several newspapers, we would use interns each summer. Time after time we would get young photographers who had talent, had good equipment, had great desire but, after three years of college photography/photojournalism classes, knew almost NOTHING about photography. I had a standing order for all interns to never use automatic exposure but shoot everything on manual. Auto focus was allowed. At the end of the summer, without fail, every intern thanked me for forcing them to learn something about what happens when the shutter button is pushed. However, I never found it necessary to have them use fixed focal length lenses instead of zooms. I never thought that was a big deal, although it surely couldn't hurt. That's just my thoughts on all this. The more someone knows about photography the better photographer they will be.

-- Joe Cole (jcole@apha.com), December 02, 1999.

I think the approach depends on the students and the purpose of the course. If it's a part of a degree-level university program, absolutely they should learn manual exposure & focus technique first.

If the students are younger (under 10 years old) I'd even take that a step further and have them make pinhole cameras & learn to use them. I've done this in a camp setting where our resources were very limited and pinhole photography was an inexpensive way to discover how the photographic process works. The kids loved it and were proud of their work--and hardly noticed that the camp didn't have enough funds to spring for a couple of real cameras!

I'd also recommend getting older students to do pinhole photography, although this would be as an adjunct to more traditional picture-taking.

OTOH, if it's an adult ed class I'd rather let them use auto-everything cameras with zoom lenses & manual overrides and concentrate on composition, lighting, etc.

And, of course, I'd start 'em right, in B&W (but then again, I'm biased).

As an interesting aside, during my PDN stint I spoke with a number of long-time photojournalists who said that many of the kids coming out of PhotoJ schools are incredibly illiterate when it comes to technique and as a result rely completely on automation. As a result, if something goes wrong or there's a situation that requires any kind of exposure calculation, the new kids are stuck while the veterans simply go into manual mode

-- Mason Resnick (bwworld@mindspring.com), December 02, 1999.

I should have added something about format. We just seem to take for granted that everybody does everything in 35mm. I've always liked taking people through the 4x5 process. They can take the thing apart and see that it's just a box full of air- film slid into one end, the lens on the other. Not everybody wants to use a 4x5, but fooling with it seems very beneficial to developing a gut feel for the mechanics of photography. I suspect Mason's pinhole project does exactly the same thing, plus gives the satisfaction of creating a working gizmo with your own two hands. Drifting off topic, as a instrument designer, I'm amazed that most people don't really understand where things (like cameras and lenses) come from. That ordinary people (with a little skill) can use a lathe and other machine tools to make just about anything. Amateurs routinely grind telescope mirrors and lenses to a precision as good or better than most camera lenses are built to. Manufacturers have gotten so good at hiding the true mechanics of things that we've lost our curiosity about how they work. Personally, the only way I can understand something is to understand how the pieces work together to make the whole.

-- Conrad Hoffman (choffman@rpa.net), December 02, 1999.

Well, I'm still learning, but I don't do much teaching.

For students who want, need, and can handle, a decent level of control: 5x4, B&W. I'm convinced that to get a decent level of control, it is much easier to lean the three fundamental controls (focus, aperture, shutter speed) and their effects than it is to understand all the complex decisions an autoomated camera makes, and these vary across all the different camera models. Once the three fundamentals are learnt, an automated camera can be more easily understood.

How can anyone understand lighting if they can't use a light meter?

But for some people, anything at all technical obscures their vision. I don't think this applies to many people, but for them, fully automatic gear (and assistants to control the lighting etc) may be the only way to produce good photos.

I think B&W is better than colour to start, because we have more opportunities for control, so the student can learn more about factors such as contrast and density.

-- Alan Gibson (Alan.Gibson@technologist.com), December 03, 1999.

I'm part of the thread being examined here. I have taught people to use a camera and process their own film and print their own pictures. If you look at these answers above, and they are very valid, look at the level of the respondant's photographic knowlege. All of the responders are proficient in photographic technique. They've already learned how things work. And most of them learned when there wasn't AF. Now remember that most Auto focus/exposure/aperture/iso/everything else but the kitchen sink, also have a fully manual setting. Therein lies the point of my argument. Remember how frustrating it was to try and remember that the aperture was the opposite of the film speed numbering system? f22 let's in less light than f5.6(scatches head)? And how can f5.6 at 250 be the same as f22 at 15(scratches head some more)? Oh well I'll never learn all this. And most people give up at this point and never realize how easy it can be. And they go out and buy an overprices P&S. It doesn't have to be so with a camera that can do everything for you "and" be manual when you want to learn something. It makes it fun to be able to use the damn thing when things are happening fast but you've just started and fun to really learn when things are going more slowly. At the newsroom it was important to have the intern know if the info the camera was giving them was accurate. At the camp it was fun to make and use a pinhole camera. Captive audience. How many kids went on to learn photography? Too many of the people who I have given a few lessons to have not taken it much further because they couldn't get anything worthwhile right out of the box when they had a manual only camera. They wanted to make pictures, not become processional photographers. But quite a few who had AF cameras learned as they went on, how to really use the damn thing as they became interested in learning to be better. Learning to override the stupid beast. And that is the point. Automatic is the tool that flattens the learning curve and allows those of us who aren't fanatical to slowly learn it but still get something out of it right away. So when I come across people who want to learn to use a camera and want to know what they should get to help them, I always suggest they get an auto focus/exposure camera with a zoom. Not some big expensive model with a cannon on the front of it. Just a modest AF/M camera with a moderate zoom(28-80mm) in front. And then I enroll them in a Jr. College course or help them all I can. And I always tell them that if they really want to get what they see, learn to process their own stuff. Make sense? James

-- james (james_mickelson@hotmail.com), December 04, 1999.

I am currently a college student of photography and have only been taking the art seriously for about three years now. My first photography class was in my last year of high school and I will be forever thankful of the techniques my teacher used when teaching this wonderful craft.

My first assignment was to build and create a small portfolio with a pinhole camera. Though my results were less than brilliant I gained incredible amounts of knowledge about how camera's, film, papers, and chemistry works. Three weeks and several pinhole images later I was taught to use a very large and very old 4x5 camera. Once again, my results were less than desirable, but the knowledge gained was amazing. For the rest of the year I took images with an old Pentax K1000. Manual everything and often without a working light meter. It was complete trial and error, and a wonderful learning experience.

Now that I am at the college level, I am amazed at how little many of my fellow students actually know about photography. Many of them have no idea what a 4x5 camera is and trying to explain the concept of depth of field is a nightmare. I strongly feel that because they have never seen or been exposed to the basics of photography, they lack the courage to be experimental.

I really have no idea were I am going with this, just thought I would add my two cents.

Andrew Kaiser

-- Andrew Kaiser (akaiser@rushorder.com), December 05, 1999.

I taught in a classroom for many years and continue to do so through workshops here and there. One of the main things I have learned is that the two concepts of seeing and technique should not be seperated from each other. Setting up a course of study that involves each is really not that difficult. Giving students assignments that use one to explain the other keeps the student interested and learning within both areas. And allows each student to explore the issues they are most interested in while learning and experiencing the other. Giving a student an automatic camera and dealing with only imaging making results in a dumbing down the individuals potentical as not only a photographer, but also as a viewer of the medium. In establishing his program at MIT many years ago, Minor White ( knowing his was not teaching people to become photographers ) put together a class (called creative audiance) based upon the appreciation of the medium Its main concern was to educate these individuals in understanding what was require to produce a memorable image. In fact many of his assignments. etc are still used today in most photo programs throughout the field of education.

-- jim megargee (mvjim@interport.net), December 11, 1999.

And then there is a difference in whether the person wanting to learn photography is dedicated to learning the craft or just interested in using a camera. The person that truly wishes to learn the craft and art of photography is much more dedicated and therefore does their homework than a person who wants to use a camera and isn't willing to put in the effort necessary to master it. James

-- james (james_mickelson@hotmail.com), December 11, 1999.

I taught photography at two junior colleges. My "Introduction to Photography" (100 level course) started with 4 weeks of instruction beginning with the electromagnetic spectrum, exposure and cameras, development, photo-chemistry, some photo science, and when everyone had a grip on the basic mechanics of the entire system, we got into taking photographs. Each photo project had both an aesthetic component and a technical component. The students did 8 projects, and we had a critique & technical session once a week.

I taught a lot of people who used photography as part of their job, such as police and fire personnel, and archeology majors. Here's the interesting part. Invariably, at least once a year a former student would come back to me after going to another college or for additional job-related photo training, and they would thank me for the thorough prepartion and understanding of photography that they had. One of my students went to a famous photo-j university, and at Christmas she came to see me and said she was way ahead of the rest of the people in her curriculum because she understood the mechanics and science aspects of photography and the other people didn't.

I think many formal courses do not address these aspects because the people teaching do not have a good background in the technical aspects of photography. They then disguise this by saying that they don't want to inhibit the students creativity.

My observation about photo MFA's is that most do not have a photo background. "Fine art" schools want MFA photo majors to have a history, social studies, or other background and NOT a photo background. When I've discussed this with the heads of several art schools, they say that the technical portions of photography "can be learned by anyone"; "we're looking for people who can think, and are more well rounded than someone with a degree in photography." Uh huh. Only the people in the MFA programs seem to learn just enough to produce the photos that they need too for their degree - and no more. Then they go into teaching and perpetuate the mediocrity.

-- steve (s.swinehart@worldnet.att.net), December 20, 1999.

I agree with Steve. i am one of those MFA students who learned a lot about thinking and developing myself as an artist but not much on the technical side. That is a huge mistake for any school to make and I have had to learn it all out of school while paying back my school loan. It is really necessary to learn about yourself as an artist AND to learn the technical aspects of making a photograph. They can be taught together.

-- kathleen (dogdishz@prodigy.net), October 18, 2001.