when you really stop to think about it, the amount of time it takes to take a really amazing photo can be kind of ridiculous. on the surface it seems so simple. point and shoot. but no, that is really not how a good photo is taken most of the time, except by accident or coincidence.

so how do you boil down the most essential knowledge about camera handling and photography into a digestible lesson plan? how do you know what to include and what to leave out? and in what order to present the information so it doesn’t get all jumbled up?

that is my task over the next few days. and it’s made easy by the fact that this lesson plan will be related to one specific type of photography, which is by coincidence one of the best places to enter into the photo realm: environmental portraiture.

at the outset, my hypothesis is that my goal will be to build a template on which the student can apply their own style once the principles are mastered, or at least understood and adopted. once it is built, i will share it here.