Intro to Digital Photography & Photoshop

Welcome to Art 35 at Stanford Continuing Studies! This 8 week course will introduce you to the basics of your DSLR camera, enable you to take better photos and will provide an introduction to editing and retouching your images in Photoshop CC.

Each week, you can find course materials via this Dropbox link.

Week 1 Class Outline:

• Introducing the group
• Learning from the masters: What makes a good photo?
• Digital Camera Basics: F-Stop/Aperture, Shutter Speed, priority settings on camera, Flash, White Balance, ISO, lens length, motion control, light meter in camera.
• Composition/Lighting
• Shooting in RAW (RAW vs JPG)
• File type and size basics (jpg/tiff/psd/png/pdf, etc…).
• Thinking ahead: creating a cohesive series of images

What Makes a Good picture? Lighting, exposure, composition, quality, color, and subject matter are some of the main considerations.

Let's start with composition. We will look at the work of 3 well known photographers to think about composition: Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston and Gregory Crewdson.
Here's a short video interview on the working process of Gregory Crewdson:



Considerations when thinking about composition:

• Look at all 4 corners of your frame- are you chopping anything off awkwardly?
• What is the subject? (Should be clear what the viewer should look at)
• Rule of 3rds, strive for balance
• Try NOT centering your subject
• Are there any interesting lines in the image I can work with?
• Look for lines, shapes, geometry that guide the eye and frame the subject
• create some "tension space" between objects in the frame.

Rule of Thirds: breaking the frame in thirds both horizontally and vertically, place points of interest in the intersections or along the lines so that your photo becomes more balanced.

Look how the composition in the above image by Henri Cartier-Bresson falls perfectly into the rule of thirds.

Always Shoot RAW: (not JPG)
RAW files are much bigger because they store much more information in the shadows and highlights that can be subtracted later if need be.

Digital Camera Basics:
Try taking your camera off Auto and shooting on Manual. "M Setting". You'll really be able to custom tailor the look you're going for that way.

There are 3 main factors that determine exposure, or how bright or dark your picture will be: F-stop (same as aperture), Shutter Speed and ISO:

Start here:

Try setting your camera to ISO 200, 1/60 Shutter speed and F3.5.  Think of it as a science experiment - keeping one item constant, change the other 2 variables. I usually keep my F-stop as the constant (at the lowest number my lens allows like F2.8 or F3.5) and change the shutter speed and ISO according to the lighting around me. I change the shutterspeed first, and changing the ISO is my last resort (and usually only happens when I'm in a darker area).

• Aperture/F-Stop: (Aperture and f-stop are the same thing). I generally set my F-stop to the smallest number possible (like F2.8 or F3.5) because I like a blurry background (shallow depth of field). The smaller the F-stop number, the blurrier the background:

• Shutter Speed: Set your shutter speed to 1/60 or faster (1/125, 1/250 etc...) to avoid motion blur when shooting hand-held. Shooting at a shutter speed slower than 1/60 (1/30, 1/15, 1/4 etc... ) may cause motion blur. You should use a tripod when shooting at a number smaller than "60".

• ISO: Take ISO off "Auto" and set it manually. The only reason to increase the ISO number is if you're in a low light setting (indoors or at night). Depending on your camera, when you choose a really high number, like 1600 or higher, you may start to see unattractive graininess (speckelled noise). Like this:

 Other items to set on your camera:

• Auto White Balance. This will ensure your image never looks too blue or too orange. Below is what may happen if you have your white balance on the wrong setting for where you are shooting. (the flower images below were shot inside)

How do different lenses make the picture look different?
Here's a great overview. But basically, if you have one zoom lens, try shooting your subject both from up close and from far away. The perspective will change:

Generally, portraits are more flattering when you stand far away and zoom in as well.

RAW vs. JPG:

RAW files are the ones that come right off your camera. You can't save a file as RAW. Each manufacturer has its own label...Nikon RAW files are .NEF,  Canon's are .CRW, etc...

JPGs are smaller compressed files. They take up less room on your computer because they don't have as much detail and information. JPGs can be both hi-res or lo-res. You can print from the hi-res ones, and the lo-res ones go online.

When files have layers in Photoshop, you save them as .PSD or .TIF. (JPGs and RAW files cannot have layers).  It really varies file to file and camera to camera, but below is a very estimated summary of approximately how big these types of files are.

Also very important to remember is that once you shrink an image, you can't make it big again. It's kind of like cutting a piece of paper in half: you can tape it back together but it won't look as good. When making a web size image, always save a duplicate.

Image on the left is print size (hi-res). Image on the right was shrunk to web size (lo-res) then enlarged back to print size (and looks terrible!)