PHOTOGRAPHY

Planned Pathway to Photographic Competence Courses

Know your camera ( short course 3 hours)
How to take better photographs ( short course 3 hours)
Picasa ( 5 weeks of 1.5 hours)
Digital Photography ( 5 weeks of 1.5 hours)
Advanced Digital processing ( 5 weeks of 1.5 hours)

You can find these courses listed under short courses on the course timetable page.

Do we use any commercially available Graphics Editing Program?

Yes - PhotoImpact

This image editing program is one of a number where you can learn to enhance your digital photographs and scans. The skills learnt from this program can be transferred to other similar programs.

Learn how to use the editing panels and tools, save in different forms, compress files for e-mail, apply different effects as well as adjust brightness, contrast, and colour balance.

Picasa Course

"Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of famed Spanish painter Pablo Picasso; the phrase mi casa for "my house", and "pic" for pictures (personalized art). In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering it as a free download." Source Wikipedia.

We highly recommend this free software and have the following Picassa course which aims to familiarise users with this excellent graphics organiser.

Prerequisite: Must have completed the FILE MANAGEMENT course or have a good working knowledge of WINDOWS file structures. Ideally you should download and install "PICASA" onto your computer before class. Bring some photographs on a flash drive or memory card.

The all-new Google "Picasa" 3.9 features new enriching options to manage, edit and show off your photos. You can share Photos with friends, by email, or by uploading into "Picasa Web Albums". It provides many simple yet effective editing tools and includes a great Photo Viewer to use in Windows Explorer.

Know your Camera

This 3 hour course for members wanting to get to know the workings of the point and shoot camera. The course is "hand on"; you will need your camera (with batteries fully charged), your manual, the camera USB cable and a coloured highlighter.

Course Content :

Setting up your camera (date, language etc)
Basic operations
Playing back images
Uploading to the computer
Erasing
Printing
Understanding the LCD screen
Understanding shutter lag

After this course you should have a reasonable understanding of your camera.

We recommend you then book in for "How to take better Photographs". This is another short course dealing with camera techniques and principles that will help you improve your photography. ( to be added at a later date )

Digital Photography

This will include the following information:

Using your Digital Camera - Transferring images from camera to computer
Processing images for viewing on the computer, sending by e-mail and printing.
Editing and enhancing images - Printers, Paper and Printing - Useful Reference