Digital Darkroom Class: Intro

I started a "Digital Darkroom" class last night. It runs for 10 weeks and is held at a local arts center. It is taught by a local photographer, Peter Schutte, a Dutchman who makes his daily living from selling his photography, as well as the teaching of photography.

Each week we bring our laptops to class and learn more new tools in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. He wants us to "do homework" each week by practicing what we learned. I hope to do one blog post a week with a brief recap of the material covered in the class, showing one example of the lesson using my own personal stock of photos. I don't know if I can follow through with that every week, but it's the goal. I have a lot that I want to get done in the next four months before baby#3 arrives, and two nights per week allocated to photography seems like too much (one night for the class, one night to practice and then blog the results). I have resolved that I will not beat myself up if it just doesn't happen for a given week. :)

Other random thoughts:

• I think $185 for a ten-week class, where each class is 2.5h, is a fantastic value.  He teaches this same class out of his own home in NE Portland for $220 tuition.
• There are only three students in the class, and the other two are not "dumb."  They know how to use a mouse and other basics.  One of them even borders on "savvy."
• The class moves a little slowly for me, but these types of classes ALWAYS move way too slowly for me.
• The teacher didn't give us a syllabus or any type of overview for what the ten weeks of class will cover. I would like to know that, just to wrap my head around it.
• Mostly, I want to know if we are going to get down and dirty with RAW processing.  I guess I could just ask him!
• He is very patient.  I don't necessarily need a patient teacher (see bullet point #3).
• That said, he is very experienced, a good communicator, and garners my attention for a good 85-90% of the class (what can I say, I'm a daydreamer), so I'm happy with the teacher.
• Each week, we bring our laptops to class, to practice everything hands-on.  He has a CD of prepared practice images that he handed out to us.  The class is 85% hands on, 5% lecture, 10% story telling. It's a good mix, for me.
• We have two people using Macs (teacher, student A) and two using Windows (me, student B).  We have two people using Photoshop CS (teacher, student B) and two using Elements (me, student A).
• That said, student B is able to download 3 extra copies of Photoshop CS (version 4), and offered to sell it each to me and student A for $50 each.  So, we will all be using the same software, and score, I get a cheap copy of CS!  (even if it's not the latest version).  The teacher says the curves tool in CS is WAY better than the similar methods in Elements (whatever that means), so he is pleased we can all just work in CS.

This ends my initial blog post to describe the course.  Hopefully in the next week I will be able to do a blog post with the first homework: selecting a specific area of a photo and adjusting brightness/contrast for that selection.

Note to Amber: the first thing he went over in class is "how to get your file to open up in Photoshop for editing." I mentioned "yeah, one of my friends warned me that she had been confused by that" and he said "yeah, that happens to everyone.  It's so confusing."  You would think a basic operation like opening a file into the right program wouldn't be so mysterious!