Photography Class Changes Student Perspective

To some, the world can start to look more appealing, more mesmerizing and more eventful overnight.

This happened to EvCC international student Aline Sertori after she took Photo 110 with Ellen Felsenthal this quarter.

Though she had already taken a short-term photography workshop in her home country, she feels this class has made her love of photography have many folds.

 This picture of Aline Sertori was taken with slow shutter speed 

of 30 sec. in a completely dark room with hands changing positions 

to show the Blur Motion technique.  

“Now I see why there are some pictures which people would normally think of just a trash or shoes. It is what the photographer’s perception of how he or she sees the world and wants the world to see,” she said.

In this class, students walk away with various aspects of shooting pictures without flash. They are made to operate professional cameras such as SLR or DSLR’s T3 and T3i models.

Through the quarter, students practise camera settings while functioning in manual mode including ISO and White Balance settings, Shutter Speed, Histogram, Aperture: normally known as f-stop among photographers, distance from the subjects, foreground and background, auto and manual focus and many others.

This photo, taken by Aline Sertorim shows the Point of View
and Frozen Motion techniques in photography.

Sertori is not the only student who is excited about the photography class.

“As long as I have my camera in my hand, I hold all the joy in the world,”wrote Xinxin Zhang on her Facebook status.

Zhang is an international student, majoring in English literature and at the same time finding unique ways to shoot the world with camera and is taking Photo 110 with Lauren Greathouse.

“Before taking this class, I had always wondered, when watching professional pictures, how those could possibly be taken with camera only,” she inquired.

She believes that learning photography changed her way of perceiving the world. 

Taken by Xinxin Zhang, this photo shows the Point of View
technique in which the photographer aims in a unique
way to capture a scene or object in a different way.

“Previously, I was more into writing to express my feelings for anything," she explained. "Now I have developed a love to shoot to express my feelings in a photographic way.”

“I have 80 percent more control over professional camera settings now than ever before,” said Sertori, adding that she has worked on five projects so far, such as Camera Control, Depth of Field: Shallow and Total, Capturing Motion, Design with Adobe Bridge, and Digital Experimentation on Adobe Photoshop.

Apart from this, students learn basic tools on a program application called Adobe Photoshop in order to change the effectiveness of their photos. This includes global and tonality corrections, retouching, sharpening, burning and dodging, compositing, blending and filters.

An international student from Indonesia, Ali Salmande Harahap considers taking Photo 110 as "good experience."

This photo, taken by Ali Salmande, shows the Shallow or
Depth of Field technique in which one object stands out
from others in the whole scene. 

“I learned how to take photo with shallow depth of field, greater depth of field, motion, and panning style,” he said.

He said that the class changed the way he would take photos.

“Before, I just took the picture with 'auto mode' with my camera, now I always try to take a photo with 'manual mode'.”

Another aspect of the class is printing pictures and dry mounting those for presentation. Dry mounting is a process by which photographers permanently secure a print to a flat surface such as mat board. This not only protects the print from rough handling, but also works to frame the image.



Story by Adnan Ali