Overview

This 3-hour photography workshop presents the following:

• How to iden­ti­fy and describe your lens
• Focal length and angle of view
• Aper­ture and its effects
• Shoot­ing in Aper­ture Pri­or­i­ty mode
• Depth of field
• Tak­ing pho­tos with selec­tive focus (blur­ry background/foreground)
• Tak­ing pho­tos with deep focus (sharp through­out)

Recommended prerequisites

Work­shop 101: Cam­era basics

Description

Con­tem­po­rary cam­eras are mar­vel­lous feats of elec­tron­ic engi­neer­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the only redeem­ing qual­i­ties of the instruc­tion man­u­als shipped with cam­eras are their seda­tive qual­i­ties. Good jokes aside, cam­era user man­u­als are mediocre at both guid­ing you towards, and clear­ly explain­ing, the core pho­to­graph­ic func­tions. Some­what iron­i­cal­ly, an instruc­tion­al man­u­al is more like­ly to pro­vide users with a pre­cise break­down of dif­fer­ent video com­pres­sion for­mats than explain why F-num­bers express aper­tures. Expo­sure Ther­a­py to the res­cue!

In this sec­ond instal­ment of our four-course series of pho­tog­ra­phy work­shops for begin­ners, you will dis­cov­er the main pho­to­graph­ic fea­tures and poten­tial of your lens. The work­shop will start by explain­ing how your lens’ focal length, in con­junc­tion with your camera’s sen­sor size, deter­mine the angle of view. Then, we will review how the aper­ture influ­ences expo­sure and use that as a spring­board into a dis­cus­sion of its sec­ondary char­ac­ter­is­tics, such its effect on per­ceived sharp­ness, aber­ra­tions, vignetting, and, last­ly, depth of field and selec­tive focus.

Dur­ing the prac­ti­cal half of the work­shop, you’ll be briefed about using aper­ture pri­or­i­ty mode (A/Av mode) to explore and apply the con­cepts learned in the first half of the les­son to real-world pho­tog­ra­phy.