I recently had the honor of attending a four day version of Mike Veitch's photography course held in the Philippines. My background is a cerrtified beginner. I could spell ISO on a good day but had no idea of how the different settings all fit together. Fortuntely, the course was structured such that a raw beginner like myself can benefit as much, if not more, than someone who already has an idea what they're doing.
The course can be broken down into three broad areas.
Technical covers all of the technical components of the camera. All of the basics, including aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc. Special emphasis was placed on getting them all to work together and the inobvious factors like depth of field.
Artistic covers all of the stuff the make the picture stand out. This was the part to listen to in order to get more than fish butts and ID pics.
Critiquing. After each dive, Mike works with each attendee on what went right and wrong with each shot. The comments simply address what might be used to have made the picture better, assuming it wasn't a good picture in the first place.
The last part of the class was an intro to photoshop and dealt with color correction, removing backscatter, file formats, raw vs. jpeg, saving files for different purposes, etc.
It's really amazing to see the difference between what I used to do for pictures and what I do now, there are some from the class that are really nice and there's no way I would have put together both the technical and artistic bits without help. The course was definately worth the money and anyone who has an interest in photography would do well to consider one of Mike's upcoming courses (Bali or Puerto Galera).
The course can be broken down into three broad areas.
Technical covers all of the technical components of the camera. All of the basics, including aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc. Special emphasis was placed on getting them all to work together and the inobvious factors like depth of field.
Artistic covers all of the stuff the make the picture stand out. This was the part to listen to in order to get more than fish butts and ID pics.
Critiquing. After each dive, Mike works with each attendee on what went right and wrong with each shot. The comments simply address what might be used to have made the picture better, assuming it wasn't a good picture in the first place.
The last part of the class was an intro to photoshop and dealt with color correction, removing backscatter, file formats, raw vs. jpeg, saving files for different purposes, etc.
It's really amazing to see the difference between what I used to do for pictures and what I do now, there are some from the class that are really nice and there's no way I would have put together both the technical and artistic bits without help. The course was definately worth the money and anyone who has an interest in photography would do well to consider one of Mike's upcoming courses (Bali or Puerto Galera).
