Archive for May, 2012

Interview with the author

AndyAnderson has been a photography professional for more than thirty years.  His work across various media has been widely published.  In the last decade, he has dedicated more of his time to instruction, helping other photographers to unlock the potentials of digital photography.  He recently sat down to discuss his latest course, Learning Adobe Lightroom 4 and outlining how this new release from Adobe offers digital photographers so much control.

A. I’m always happy to talk about teaching and to work with InfiniteSkills!

A. Teaching a course like Adobe Lightroom has a particular set of challenges and advantages.  The most important thing is that Lightroom is a program designed for photographers who come from a background in film.  The program integrates elements of the traditional dark room into the photographers experience in working in a digital environment.
So, the biggest challenge for me is in working between worlds and really showing students how Lightroom is designed to communicate with their experience in film. In order to teach people that are using this program, an instructor has to be able to think like a film photographer, so I make use of my skill sets from both the digital and film photography worlds to ensure that I teach the most useful pieces of Adobe Lightroom, and also that the course is taught really in the language of the photographer.

A. Well, I am a professional photographer, university professor, and have been shooting photographs since I was about 10 years old. I have lived through the transition from traditional film to digital, and I know first-hand the intricacies of both mediums as well as the difficulties in making that change.
It’s difficult for the student on their own to understand how to best transition from the traditional world of the darkroom, to the world of the computer; or from working with chemicals and light-sensitive papers and film, to pushing buttons and working with bits and bytes.
So I think it’s really my ability to draw from such a rich history in both mediums that comes through for students and allows me to be an effective guide. I can help them fit the pieces together and really optimize Lightroom’s capabilities.

A. Well as far as specifics in the course, a lot of it boils down to terminology.  Traditional photographers that lived in a darkroom (like me) used words like dodge and burn, or sponge, for instance. It might sound like  gibberish to someone raised in the digital environment, but they really shape how a traditional film photographer thinks about the development process.
Our Lightroom tutorial draws on this experience to make the transition as painless as possible.

A little more about the tutorial: