Wow!!!!

I looked out onto a classroom that was completely full today!  It seemed like every seat was filled and that is absolutely thrilling to be an instructor when that happens.

If you are wondering what I am babbling about – along with our business I also teach at Richland Community College in Decatur, Illinois. This is my fourth year as an adjunct (that means part-time in college-speak) faculty member.

I am so excited about this semester coming up that I can barely hold myself together. The world of digital photography continues to change so fast and so wildly that it is hard to keep up – and I have to say, when you teach photography it forces you to keep up!

When I started four years ago Photoshop CS2 was the modern program – and now we are on Photoshop CS4. No one had even heard of what has become an industry standard, Photoshop Lightroom. Cameras were topping out at 6 mB. And who would have even begun to think that digital SLRs would be  producing videos that rival cameras that costs thousands more? And that just scratches the surface.

But – one of the coolest things about all this technology and all these advances, all they do is  allow a photographer to do a better job faster. I don’t think there will ever come a time when photographers are not part  our lives. No matter the advances of camera, it still takes a human to create an image.

I have yet to see a camera that captures the quality of the light (as I heard my friend Bob Davis say more than a few times this summer) without a photographer first seeing or creating it. Nor have I ever seen a camera pose a person so they look thin or eliminate that horrible double-chin.  And lots of other things.

I have the perfect image that I’ve posted with this blog to talk about the quality of light as this gorgeous couple I shot in Bel Air, Maryland illustrates. Cool – and they were fun to work with to boot!

If I ever get a camera that can do this without my input, well, I can hang up my Nikons and fade into the sunset.

And I look forward to working with this newest crop of budding photographers on just this kind of an adventure.

Now – if only I had actually taken a photo of that classroom today! Maybe for the next  post…