Hermitage Museum Photography | Class Review

This blog post will be a class review of our Intro to Photography course at the Hermitage Museum.

Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me over the last 6 weeks!

It has been so much fun getting to see y’all grow and evolve in this class.

Today we did a class recap chatting about the main things we change every time we take a photo (ISO, Shutter Speed and F-Stop/Aperture).

We talked about storing your images and ways to keep them secure.

I recommend solid state hard drives, and Western Digital is one of the top brands in the industry.

We also really recommend backing up your files regularly.

(pretty much all the time)

Most computers have an auto-backup feature, so be sure to take advantage of that.

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Class Review for Hermitage Museum Photo 1 Class

Keeping yourself inspired is really beneficial in keeping you moving forward on your photographic journey.

Consider taking on a 30 day photography challenge, like this one from Creative Live.

What Makes A Technically Correct Image?

For start, one should be aware that technical correctness is no substitute for artistic vision.

Here are some technical criteria in no particular order:

The exposure is correct, shadows are not lost, highlights are not clipped
The parts that need to be in focus, are in focus
There is no motion blur (caused by camera shake)
The photo does not have a color cast (probably because of incorrect white balance)
The colors are correct (what you usually see, not oversaturated or changed)
The noise/grain is not dominant
There are no sensor dust spots
There are no scratches, dust spots, interference patterns in case of scanned images
There are no obvious digital artifacts (sharpening halos, banding, compression artifacts)
Post-processing is not too obvious (think of overcooked HDR)
There is no obvious distortion, chromatic aberration, lens flare, vignetting
There is enough depth of field (important parts of your subject are not out of focus)
There is enough contrast (the photo is not flat nor overdone)
Orientation is correct, vertical objects are vertical and not leaning because of bad shot angle, horizontal objects are horizontal (usually horizon)
Skin tones are correct (in case of portraits/people shots)
The retouching marks/feel are not noticeable (think of visible cut edges in cases where different parts of image are from different photos or “Playboy skin” where all the detail is lost)

Any of these can be part of your concept or meant to create the mood, then they can be discarded.

Whether you’re following this or not depends largely on the purpose – standards are higher when you sell your images or large prints, enter contests, etc and lower when you only do them for family album.