First day of class!

Can you tell I'm excited for class to start?!  Best part is I'm taking the class with my friend Sarah.  Day 1 we met the instructor and other students in the class.  He went over a few basics and told us why all our pictures suck.  But that is all about to change.....

What we learned on Day 1

- How pictures are captured, mega pixels and memory.
So if you have a 12 MP camera - it contains 12,000 receptors that capture light.  The receptors are divided into 3 colors (red, green, blue) that capture the light.  The light then turns into electricity then into a number.  This number is the RAW data.  Most cameras are set up to save as JPEG - which cuts the size of the picture way down...the camera makes a few general assumptions about the picture (like maybe generalizing a white back ground to only one shade of white vs. the true multiple shades it contains) so you loose a lot of the detail.  FYI......every time you re-save a JPEG, you're actually loosing more data.  I think he said you can save a JPEG 90 times before its nothing.  When working in PhotoShop - most likely saving the file as TIFF.  With TIFF, you won't loose data every time you save. We'll be working with RAW eventually.

- Six qualities of Light

• Brightness
• Direction
• Color (Cool, Neutral, Warm)
• Contrast (Hard vs. Low)
• Specularity (refers to the size of a light source - so think a bright sunny day)
• Diffuse (think a cloudy day)

We had a little quiz to see if we could identify the different light qualities....I might not have a natural eye for these things.  I have a lot to learn!

First assignment - we have to take 13 pictures using the above light sources.