{"id":545,"date":"2012-08-20T16:52:40","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T23:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=545"},"modified":"2012-08-20T16:55:41","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T23:55:41","slug":"on-the-job-teaching-and-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=545","title":{"rendered":"On the Job: Teaching (and Learning)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Whenever I teach, as I’m doing this summer in a short class on action photography<\/a> at The Image Flow <\/a>in Mill Valley, I find two things to be the most challenging<\/strong>: Explaining to others what I do instinctively in a way they understand and not knowing what the students don’t know.<\/p>\n

\"BlurredThe first forces me to think in granular terms about what I do with the camera — and why<\/strong>. For example, one student asked me why I usually use ISO 400 as my base setting when most digital cameras have ISO settings lower than that. Well, I answered, somewhat lamely, it’s because I grew up on Tri-X, Kodak’s legendary\u00a0 black-and-white film<\/a>. It had an ASA of 400 and my earliest lessons about light and manual exposure were learned using that number as a base — and those lessons still work today. In other words, it’s a habit, albeit one that serves me well.<\/p>\n

The second challenge is more difficult<\/strong>. What each student knows about photography in general and the intricacies of their own camera in particular varies widely.<\/p>\n

Most, not surprisingly, came to photography in the digital age and with cameras so advanced and so automatic\u00a0 that they skipped the need to studdy the basics of photography,<\/strong> so they have a poor understanding of the connections between light and exposure, between shutter speed and aperture, and between focal length and depth of field.<\/p>\n

They all have inexpensive lenses that in a short twist of the barrel leap rom wide-angle to telephoto, so they’ve never had to master the physical art of moving through a scene with prime lenses in order to change the point of view or to get closer to or farther from a subject.<\/p>\n

Because of these gaps, each time I attempt to explain something more advanced, such as capturing the fleetness of a runner with a pan or freezing the motion of boy on bike in a half-pipe, it opens the door to a more basic discussion<\/strong> about the principles behind the technique and where to find the buttons and dials on a particular brand of camera in order to get the technical stuff right.<\/p>\n

For this reason, I learn along with my students. I learn about my own habits (good and bad), I learn how different types of cameras work (even their Nikons don’t function as mine does) and, most importantly, I learn I need patience in order to succeed<\/strong> — and that’s a lesson that applies to photography as well as teaching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I teach, as I’m doing this summer in a short class on action photography at The Image Flow in Mill Valley, I find two things to be the most challenging: Explaining to others what I do instinctively in a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[501,499,44,498,486,674,500,484,497],"class_list":["post-545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-job","category-photography","tag-blackies-pasture","tag-half-pipe","tag-nikon","tag-panning","tag-photographing-action","tag-photography","tag-runner","tag-the-image-flow","tag-tri-x"],"yoast_head":"\nOn the Job: Teaching (and Learning) - Tim Porter's Second Draft<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=545\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On the Job: Teaching (and Learning) - 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