Back in the classroom

I’m teaching an advanced digital photography class this spring at the Senior Services Center. Last night’s session was on portraits. This is a somewhat flawed (flash in the glasses) portrait of Jerry Smith, the indispensable and well-liked trash collector in our former hometown of Thorntown, Ind. His wife stuck the flower behind his ear for the picture.

I taught an introductory class in the fall of 2008. It was well-attended and my teaching got good reviews, but I had everything from experienced film shooters transitioning to digital SLRs to elderly novices with point-and-shoot digital cameras. I went into it with lofty goals of teaching stuff like f-stops, shutter speeds, ISO, depth of field, and the elements of good photographic composition. Those notions went out the window after a couple of sessions when I realized most of the folks in the class just wanted to know how to get their pictures out of their camera and into a computer and how to email pictures of their grandkids. At the same time, I had to come up with more sophisticated stuff to keep the more advanced students interested and engaged.

I’ll never do another introductory class.

But this time it’s different. I only have four students, but they’re all alumni of my introductory class and three of them have SLRs. The fourth has a high-end fixed-lens Fuji and a great eye for nature shots.

At last, I can share what I think is the really fun stuff about digital photography. Like what you can do with a picture once you get it into your computer, using Photoshop or even a free open-source image editor like GIMP (check it out at gimp.org). I mentioned GIMP at the first session last week and, wonder of wonders, one of my students actually tried it.

I would have loved to have been a teacher if I could be guaranteed interested, motivated students. That’s what I loved about being an instructor for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s RiderCourse for 10 years in the 1980s and ‘90s. I resisted taking on another class after that first introductory digital clusterfuck, but I would readily consider another of these.

Another guy volunteered to teach an introductory class a couple of months ago. I never heard how he did, but I know he went into it with the same ambitious goals that I had, only I was there to warn him how it would probably shake out. He seemed to think he knew better. But none of his students signed up for my advanced class, for whatever that’s worth.