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Introduction | Top 10 Techniques | Additional Techniques | Best Of Gallery | Digital | Photo Pages
I became really interested in Photography after taking Psychology 347 - Psychology of Visual Communications, taught by Professor James B. Maas, my favorite professor at Cornell. Professor Maas also teaches Psychology 101, the largest lecture in the nation. It was quite a change to go from a class with over 1,700 students where he was just a tiny dot on the stage with great lecturing ability, to a small seminar with 12 students. But it was great getting to know and learn from him, making this my favorite class in my 4 years in good old Ithaca, NY. I'm still not sure how I was selected among hundreds to be in the class, the only one I took that required an application essay (the other I've heard of was Carl Sagan's class), but I must've either had a great essay or they needed to fill an Engineering quota =) I bought my Nikon 6006 camera body specifically for the class in January 1994 and have taken over 10,000 photographs with it, mostly with a Sigma Aspherical 28-200mm lens that I bought in Hong Kong in 1997. For wider zoom capabilities, I'll lug my Tamron 70-300mm lends around. A polarizing filter is essential as it cuts down on window glare and can deepen the blues in the sky. The drawback is that it cuts back the light by a full F-stop. To compensate, I'll use higher speed film, use a tripod or steadying surface, limit the use of the zoom (this cuts back on the available light), or sometimes I'll even screw off the polarizing filter. Recently, I have become more involved with digital photography and see the growing trend away from traditional photography. The most important aspect of photography to me is composition. I understand the technical aspects of photography but pay much more attention to What is captured and leave the How it is captured to the camera. There are circumstances where I know the camera could potentially become confused in tricky lighting conditions and will manually adjust the settings to compensate, but usually I leave the camera in Automatic mode where it has performed quite well. The following pages describe the techniques involved in taking excellent photos. There are several examples and I hope it will broaden your knowledge of photography and help you out the next time you pick up your camera and look through the view finder or LCD screen.
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