Good Teaching Techniques

Good Teaching Techniques

by William Lulow

Being a trained teacher, I have noticed over the years that the most successful instruction is accomplished by modeling a certain task for the student and then letting the student try doing the same thing, just the way the teacher did it. A “hands on” approach is the best and fastest way to teach a technique for doing most anything. The student needs to have the same kind of equipment (not necessarily the same brand) and be shown how to use it effectively. There are many levels of equipment these days in the photographic field from cheap, amateur quality to expensive, professional quality. If you are an occasional photographer, just shooting images for yourself and your family, probably an iPhone or a decent point-and-shoot camera would suffice. If you become even a more serious amateur, you then need to upgrade your equipment to more expensive models because you are becoming more discerning about the quality of your images. When you expect more quality from your own images, you need to have good quality equipment and expect to pay more for it.

I recently was working with a student and as we were shooting the same images with our respective cameras, she noticed how much better my images were with a better quality lens. You can say the same thing over and over but until one can actually see the difference, it won’t make much sense.

The shots we did were taken with good quality cameras but one lens was a f/3.5 15-85mm zoom lens while the other was an f/2.8 17-55mm zoom lens. The faster lens (f/2.8) was much sharper through the various apertures and the aperture remained constant through the various focal lengths. The slower, cheaper lens could not shoot at f/3.5 at 85mm. Both lenses were made by the same manufacturer but the faster lens cost about twice what the slower one did.

So, the advice I received years ago is still true: get the fastest and best lens you can afford. A lens that won’t carry the widest aperture through all the focal lengths, is inferior to one that can. A constant f/2.8 lens will, most likely, be sharper than a comparable lens that is much slower. In general, prime lenses are sharper than zoom lenses. There are not as many movable elements. Even though zoom lenses sometimes make composing a shot a bit easier, prime lenses force us to think more about composition.

We need to practice shooting images all the time to get really proficient at it. Many of my workshops include field trips during which time the students are faced with having to learn how their equipment functions in order to get the shots that we cover. They bring their questions up on the spot and are then shown how to perfect a certain technique. It is learning by doing!

With all this said, a good photographer, one who knows what the camera can do and how to use it correctly, can probably make great images with any camera. So, when I teach my students, I am always trying to teach the process of SEEING as well as making images. If one’s “eye” becomes trained to see light, composition and other nuances in the process, the images created will become better.

The other point about teaching techniques is that in order for the student to actually learn something, the process itself has to be objective. Far too many photography teachers do what I like to refer to as a “portfolio review.” This is where the student submits an image or several images and the teacher then critiques them. Problem with this method is that the critique is only one person’s opinion.

What I do is to give an assignment and sketch what a successful execution of that assignment will look like. Then, it is a fairly straightforward and objective exercise to see whether or not the student achieved the correct result. There is in opinion involved. My technique involves this objective approach over a series of connected lessons which build one on the other in a progressive line toward achieving more competence with one’s equipment.

With lighting for portraits, for example, the lessons progress from just ordinary room light to using one flood light and on up to as many as five lights. It is a step-by-step process. This is the best way to learn.

With getting the most from your DSLR, as another example, the learning progresses from knowing what each of the controls does, up to and including how to use all of them for maximum effect to produce the images you want.

Here’s an example:

This is a chart on apertures. It shows clearly, what each of the various lens openings look like.

Here’s a pictorial example of what they produce:

An example of very limited depth-of-field with an out-of-focus background. (Large aperture)

An example of a similar image shot with a greater depth-of-field. (Smaller aperture)

So, the process by which a student is brought to see what he or she is being taught is a hands-on one where he/she can actually see what that process is and how to use it.