Photography Class: Day 9- Understanding Exposure Part 1

Before class began, I talked with my female students about becoming teachers for the next group of girls. As I've described before, obtaining girls, finding locations and people to be allowed to openly teach a group of solely women is not so easy. After reviewing the first part of the class, and being extremely happy with the progress of the students, Amy wants me to extend my time here to teach another course of brand new students. The ultimate goal here, as with all FabLabs, is to create a course solely run by Afghans so that an international does not always need to be present. A self sufficient lab, and a self sufficient FabFi team, and a self sufficient photography class.

As my time here is restricted (another reason having a self sufficient lab is necessary) and obtaining and setting up another girls class takes time, Amy and I worked up an alternative solution. I'll start another set of guys classes immediately after I finish these courses, and the girls will each become teachers to a brand new female student. This will not require me to be here, rather the girls will meet their students a few times a week and teach them the same lessons they learned from this class. Having Hameed and Rahmat here is key, especially Hameed as his sister will be one of the new teachers. Having a female who can easily collect all the new girls pictures from their teachers, and get status updates and progress info is key. Perhaps once a week she can contact all the teachers, get the pictures and get info, and send it to me. Small details still need to be figured out, but this is the general idea.

I talked with the girls about doing this, told them to think about, how it would work and everything, and let me know within the next class or two if they think it's possible to do and/or if they would like to actually do it.We shall see how it turns out, hopefully all will be good and I'll get a majority of my girls who would like to participate. I don't want to force them to do it as part of the course, and hopefully I won't have to, hopefully they'll all have so much fun with this course that they'll want to do nothing more than to spread the knowledge amongst their fellow Afghan friends. Onto the class...

Alright, so the outcome of todays class was more or less expected. I got a million flower pictures, and the simple one regular and one macro photo of the food, if any at all. The thing that was surprising though was the amount of photos taken of fake flowers. It never even crossed my mind that given the assignment to run around taking pretty pictures of awesome flowers (Afghanistan's full of them, on trees, bushes, standing alone, everywhere, especially in Spring time) that they would stay inside and use fake flowers for the assignment. Not that this takes away from the assignment or upsets me in anyway, it was just unexpected. The day I teach a class of Afghans where everything goes exactly as expected is the day I expect the world to end. So lets view this as an extremely positive thing.

The girls continued their making me happy streak with tons of choices to choose from, and many great photos. The main problem this week with taking the macro photos is having a blurry subject, or having an enlarged subject that has not quite reached large enough to be considered "macro" (according to my own person, who is not a macro professional, but rather macro knowledgeable after reading many online articles). For the most part, when you search macro photos or get examples of macro photos, the subject takes up basically the entire picture, with very little external background, as opposed to a picture of a flower pretty close up with the some trees and bush in the background.

Of course I still tell my students that I'm really happy that they do things like this, because something I've noticed with Pashtuns (I haven't quite become acquainted with the other tribes in Afghanistan) is that they don't understand the whole learn from your mistakes business. They'll never admit they've made a mistake, which is why you often get people who speak this certain level of English, and never progress further, because they won't ever admit they aren't completely fluent. So that they're making mistakes and it's visible to all the students, I think is good. They'll never learn if they always come back with perfect photos, or I only show them the best, or always tell them it's perfect.

As expected I get tons of protest from the girls, "Oh, well, there's a better one if you go ahead."

Or, "oh, well I was doing this and that happened and this and then that and this is why it isn't perfect and then after I took it I fell and think I messed up the picture." I always laugh, and have explained many times that I want them to look at these pictures as just examples, with no relation to it, they have no idea who took it, just a random picture from the web. With that mind set, then explain to me why this is either a good or bad picture, what the photographer could have done to make it better, etc. Regardless of what the story behind why it's that way is. With that said, here are there pictures:

Fazila

Zarlashe

Fazila

Shahnaz

After reviewing the pictures, I went over a beginners guide to understanding exposure and how exactly picture taking works. The 3 exposure settings being the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. As this is much more advanced than where they are, I wanted them to just learn what these were, and what the effects of changing these could be. Explaining changing these settings, and what you would have to change in response to changing one, how much you should change them in what situations, etc. takes years. I'm hoping they'll get much more of this in the advanced class, but for now, I want them to be aware that these exist and how they effect the outcome of taking a picture.

As for the assignment, they have a nifty little low light feature on their cameras as well as a specific sunset/sunrise setting. I want them to take one sunset/sunrise picture, and one picture in a low light setting. Leaving the camera in auto will most likely not create the best pictures, so I want them to specifically move the wheel on the top to the appropriate settings. As I understand it, moving it to these settings will change the exposure triangles settings to create the best photos in these situations. If that isn't what these settings do for this camera, I'm not too sure why there are even other options besides auto and manual. A few more pictures: