Teaching On-Line Studio Art Courses in Two Year Community Colleges in Minnesota.

I belong to a listserv of art educators in the Minnesota State Colleges and University System. For a number of years, the group has been having discussions about teaching studio art courses on-line. The department I belong to at Rochester Community and Technical College has long embraced on-line learning. Their attitudes toward on-line learning and teaching with technology were a big incentive for taking my position. The attitude of many people teaching art in the MnSCU system has not always been welcoming to on-line teaching, which has been frustrating for many of my colleagues here in Rochester.

Recently, a call came out on the listserv for feedback about on-line teaching. The instructor will be representing MnSCU on a discussion panel at the College Art Association meeting this year. None of my colleagues seemed like they were going to answer the question, for fear of having an aneurism or saying something unproductive. So I had a go and summarizing our concerns. The text below is more or less the email I sent, including some typos. It seemed like a useful thing to put on the blog.

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"I suspect that one of the reasons you haven’t heard from more instructors is that the issue of on-line teaching of art courses is so charged within the MnSCU system right now. Looking around the faculty offices here at RCTC, I am aware of a number of people who have strong opinions about on-line learning and have experience teaching on-line classes. But the fear here is that the presentation to CAA will rehash the question of whether on-line learning is good or bad. For what it’s worth, that wasn’t my sense of what your email was asking for – but faculty here who have been teaching on-line have felt in the past that they were shut down or not taken seriously in discussions about on-line learning and are reluctant to go there again. I suspect the situation is more nuanced than that – I believe there are a lot of people on this list who are teaching on-line courses now.

It’s no secret that RCTC has embraced on-line learning. The first on-line courses taught in the art department here were offered in 1997. Two of our faculty members were students at RCTC then, which makes them some of the first art and design students in the country to have taken on-line art courses. Both went on to finish masters programs in Duluth and Mankato, and have returned to teach at RCTC. Both taught courses on-line for RCTC while they were pursuing their Masters degrees – one of them has been teaching on-line for over six years. More than half our faculty teaches on-line courses. Our entire faculty makes use of D2L and technology in the studio – from photoshop to powerpoint and DVDs. I am writing this to put RCTC’s attitudes toward on-line learning into some kind of context. There are programs across the MnSCU system doing all of these things, teaching with technology and offering on-line courses is just what good teaching looks like now. We aren’t special in that regard. RCTC’s attitude is to enthusiastically embrace the opportunities.

Offering an on-line drawing class seems to be a kind of litmus test for where you stand on the issue of on-line learning. RCTC has offered an on-line drawing course for a number of years. For what it’s worth, there is a lot of debate about the efficacy of this course within our department. Our painting and drawing instructor would probably prefer it wasn’t offered on-line, and even the most ardent supports of on-line learning in the department will acknowledge that there are problems with the course.

If you listen to MPR often or have been following election debates vis-a-vis education issues, you have heard governor Pawlenty and all of this years gubernatorial candidates embraced on-line learning (although Dayton was guarded in his support and expressed a preference for in-person courses). What horrified me about the discussion was that each of the candidates cited iTunes University as an example of the possibilities of on-line learning. When I heard Pawlenty discuss on-line learning on NPR, I was not certain he realized that there are actual professors teaching the courses. I worry that our state government thinks learning on-line is essentially automated and they won’t have to hire real people to teach the courses.

Given all of the above, the perspective of the department here is that debating whether or not teaching on-line is a good thing isn’t a useful discussion. On-line teaching in art departments in MnSCU is here now and not going away. The relevant questions now should be how to do it well and about how to address the labor issues that are raised so that we can support faculty who are teaching on-line appropriately. How do we answer calls from the governor to teach via the Internet and still offer meaningful learning experiences? How do we make a case for what effective teaching on-line means versus downloading courses into your iPod?

Can we start by defining what a studio art course is? Graphic Design? Photography? Printmaking? Ceramics? I teach photography and think I am a studio artist, but the term seems to mean something different as different people use it.

It seems like any course that can happen on a computer could be offered on-line. That seems to have been the position of a lot of MnSCU art departments.

It also is a no-brainer that ceramics or analog photography is difficult to offer on-line. The equipment needs are too expensive and the environmental impact is too serious for students to work at home on those courses.

I think that a lot of the objections to offering drawing on-line are that craft is a serious issue in an introductory class – learning to see scale, proportion and perspective as well as figuring out mark-making or line quality – these are all very tactile, hands on concerns that are best taught when we can give immediate feedback to students as they work. I think the same issues crop up in the darkroom, ceramics studio, or printmaking studio.

But are they really an issue in 2-D design or 3-D design, where craft is secondary to an articulation of design principals?

I’d like to propose that the issue isn’t studio vs. design-based courses, but rather the issue is courses with high craft and tactility needs/with safety and environment implications/with high equipment costs vs. courses with low craft and tactility needs/low safety and environmental impacts/low cost to entry for students. If that’s the case, I think a lot of studio courses could be offered successfully on-line or adapted to be a successful on-line experience.

Additionally, I think there is a concern with time on task for students in on-line classes. In a traditional studio course, even if a student puts no energy into work outside of class, they are guaranteed six hours a week of wrestling with drawing in-class. Time on task, in our world, makes the difference between success and failure. I think it is easy to assume that students working on-line will not spend the appropriate time on the work. Although that may not be the case.

I also think that we tend to see courses as either on-line or in-person, and that division isn’t useful. We really should be talking about a range of possibilities. They would include blended-mode classes that meet regularly and also have an on-line component. They would include in-person courses with web-enabled learning modules. They would also include in-person courses where instructors are bringing technology into the studio or utilizing D2L to facilitate courses. I am sure all of this is going on in your programs – it’s what good teaching looks like now and there are a lot of great teachers looking at this listserv.

At RCTC our drawing instructor is less than enthusiastic about offering on-line drawing. But he does post videos of his demos on D2L, mostly so that students who have missed class have a resource to turn to without bugging him for one-on-one tutorials. Our ceramics instructor shows DVDs of archival footage of artists at work. Both instructors are lobbying hard to have computers and monitors installed in their studios because projection space for PowerPoint lectures is at a premium. The drawing instructor would like student to have access to Google Images for source material, and the ceramics instructor would like to use specific software for glaze recipes. Both instructors would like the ability to show artist’s portfolios to students in an ad-hoc way, as issues come up in the studio. I have been recording my demos on an iPad and uploading the recordings onto D2L, mostly because it is easy and students seem to appreciate having the review available as they are learning to develop prints. I imagine that most of the people reading this listserv are doing some variation some of these things.

I can imagine permutations of on-line drawing courses that would address the concerns of faculty who care about tactility, feedback and craft – a class could meet one evening a week for four hours and have two hours of supplemental work outside of class facilitated by D2L. A drawing course could also meet intensively for the first three Saturdays of the semester and then continue on-line. It would be a boon to working students and a useful compromise for getting students into a studio. The same is true with ceramics or darkroom photography (were students would have access to the darkroom or ceramics studio on campus).

Just because on-line learning enables a course, doesn’t mean the course can’t ever meet in person. It doesn’t mean that the course is taken long-distance. We can address the needs of learners who show up in community colleges and still offer viable, valuable courses using on-line tools. On-line versus in-person is a false dichotomy.

A number of other concerns worth voicing:

1. What are the real costs of offering on-line courses versus in-person courses. The governor’s debates seem to suggest that they think on-line courses are going to be more affordable. You don’t have to build new facilities to house on-line students. But you do have to pay for bandwidth, server space, and faculty salaries. We’ve heard through back channels that on-line courses at RCTC are more expensive to offer than in-person courses, but no one will say officially. Does anyone have real numbers?

2. What are the effects of on-line courses on retention? Especially at a community college in a weak economy? We have better enrollment in on-line courses than in-person courses, and my guess is that on-line learning has kept the school from laying of faculty and staff.

3. What are the implications for our jobs when 3-D modeling can be taught by someone in Indiana, or India, who is sitting at home in their pajamas and the course is as effective as someone teaching in a computer lab in Rochester? Should our unions be setting some conditions for on-line courses that help keep jobs local?

4. How are we compensated for developing on-line courses or time spent training to use software that enables on-line learning? Is that another important labor issue we should be addressing?

5. What is an unreasonable number of students to try to teach in an on-line studio course? We can’t run studio students through a series of automated tests. We need to evaluate and critique original student work as it is created and provide timely feedback. Let me suggest that 28 students is a few too many. How do we set system-wide, reasonable standards for student numbers in on-line studio courses?

6. What equipment and software is MnSCU obligated to purchase to facilitate on-line teaching? Can we bring that equipment and software home as part of tele-commuting?

7. What are the requirements for office hours and a presence on campus? Should the union be advocating for the option of tele-commuting as we teach on-line courses? Can I please teach digital photography in my pajamas while I am printing work at my studio at home? Can we agree to working conditions like that without off-shoring our jobs?

8. How do we enable the supervision of adjuncts and first time teachers who are teaching on-line?

9. How do we effectively mentor older faculty who are teaching on-line for the first time? It’s rough to be a thirty-something faculty member who is in the position of being de-facto technology support for a department of baby-boomers. Likewise, its difficult to have taught for 25 years, to be an expert teacher of painting or ceramics, and find yourself needing the advice of someone just out of their MFA program. Can we establish a framework for sharing expertise where we all feel adequately compensated? Where we all feel like our strengths are taken seriously?

10. How do we draw on the experience and teaching strengths of long-time studio instructors and bring it to our on-line courses? If you are retiring in the next few years, could you please have someone video tape some of your demos so that your expertise and knowledge are not lost when you leave?

11. How do we convince MnSCU to support rich content on D2L? You can’t host streaming video on D2L, which is the only way to teach on-line studio courses effectively at this point. Can we describe what tools we need and make an across the system demand for an upgrade of servers, server spaces and software to facilitate richer on-line learning experiences?

12. How do we effectively address the differences in student computer competencies in our on-line courses? An on-line drawing course might be more feasible if you knew that all of your students could photograph their work with a digital camera, upload the image to their computer and submit it on D2L. I couldn’t promise you that my students this semester could do that.

13. Can MnSCU offer translation or transcription services for faculty who are teaching online and want to offer rich content and still be ADA compliant? I am producing videos of demos at a furious pace this semester. But if I had a student who could not hear, they would be dead in the water. I can spend hours transcribing that material myself or I could move ahead and create more content. What does MnSCU want me to do?

14. It could be that transcription services, video hosting services or other helpful resources are available commercially for cheap or free. It’s hard to know what technologies work and what technologies are available because we work in isolation. Someone teaching in Lake Superior may know about really useful tools that we haven’t heard about in Rochester – we don’t have system wide discussions about best practices on-line because we are so often bogged down in debating whether or not studio courses belong on-line. We could make huge improvements to what is offered if we could share knowledge. We need a framework and infrastructure for doing that.

15. I can’t keep up with the amount of on-line material I would like to generate for my in-person classes. I can’t imagine how hard it is to generate demonstrations and other material for on-line courses. It would be a great benefit if we could collaborate on on-line learning objects – I just finished a reasonable demo on scanning with a Nikon film scanner. I would be happy to release it as a Creative Commons video and handout and share it with anyone in the system to use or change to fit the equipment and policies at their school. We don’t have a place to share that kind of material. We don’t have a way to discuss how coordinate efforts to create that kind of material. Why are we all always starting from scratch? How can we collaborate on the hard work of teaching studio classes on-line so that we elevate the quality of courses system-wide?

16. Do our administrations understand that it is vital that we don’t offer on-line courses at the exclusion of in-person studio courses? Everyone at RCTC understands the value of working in the darkroom. Everyone here has been in classes where the feedback of the community of students has pushed our work forward after a critique. Everyone knows what it is like to have an instructor walk over and gently guide your hands as throw your first bowl on the wheel. Those experiences are vital and even though all of us support on-line teaching, no one would ever want to see the kilns or darkroom disappear. How do we communicate and advocate that position to an administration who sees on-line learning as a dollar saving measure?

17. Who is teaching on-line courses in our departments and how does that our perceptions of success or failure of on-line courses? Is it only adjuncts who are new to teaching who are teaching on-line courses? Are long time faculty with decades of teaching experience willing to take on teaching on-line courses? Are full time faculty who are teaching on-line course proficient in using technology? Have they taught one semester of an on-line course and decided teaching on-line is a waste? At RCTC we've seen a spectrum of experience and adjuncts/full-timers teaching on-line, and not surprisingly, it seems to impact the quality of the courses. I don't mean to privilege full-time over adjuncts - at RCTC it is often adjuncts who have the most experience teaching on-line.

18. Does anyone have any assessment data to support their conclusions about on-line courses? At RCTC we have been pretty on top of assessment, but couldn't provide you with an example of an instructor who has taught on-line and off-line versions of the same course using the same assessment rubrics. Is there anyone across the system that has any data collected that way who would be willing to share it? At least then our discussion about the success or failure of on-line learning could be slightly more objective. And I bet if we were collecting data honestly and holistically, we would see that while there were ways an on-line drawing course was lacking, there might be areas in a course where students where more successful than their in-person counterparts. For example, maybe they have a difficult time using the negative space effectively, but are more articulate and thoughtful when they are critiquing each others work because they have been forced to write those critiques instead of hiding in the back of the studio. More importantly, if available data showed deficiencies in on-line studio courses, maybe they would give us insights into how to teach on-line courses more effectively. If you have a strong feeling, for or against, about on-line teaching, now is the time to start brainstorming ways to collect thoughtful data to back up your arguments. That is the information your administrators are going to pay attention to."

Pizza, Rochester, MN. 2008.

IBM, Woodside Park, Rochester, MN. 2010.

On the Highway, Olmsted County, Minnesota. 2010.

Paint and Feet, Rochester, MN. 2008.

On the Highway, Chicago. 2010.

Masks and Laundry Chute, Rochester, MN. 2008.

UPS Truck, Chicago. 2010.

Foot Stool, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Parked Cars, Chicago. 2010.

Standing on the Bed, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Storefront, Chicago. 2010.

Alien, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Fire Escape, Downtown, Chicago. 2010.

Cutting Watermelon, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Alley, Downtown, Chicago. 2010.

In the Kitchen, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Downtown, Chicago(4). 2010.

Back Porch, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Downtown, Chicago (3). 2010.

In the Stairwell. Rochester, MN. 2008.

Downtown, Chicago(2). 2010.

Castle, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Lakefront, Chicago. 2010.

On Photographing Children and Meeting Students Halfway.

My colleague Almae Larson and I were sitting around the lunch table a few semesters ago when she mentioned that someday she would really like to put together a slide presentation of photographers who make images of children. It was frustrating to her that students gravitated toward images of babies in pea pods or tended to only photograph children who were doing cute, sweet things.

Feeling adventurous, I took her up on the challenge, and got on ArtStor and put a little something together, with the following artists:

August Sander
Wynn Bullock
Harry Callahan
Julia Margaret Cameron
Lewis Carroll
Emmet Gowin
Gertrude Kasebier
Lewis Hine
Jacques Lartigue
Sally Mann
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
W. Eugene Smith, and here
Anonymous 19th Century Daguerreotypes of Sleeping Babies.

If you know anything about the photographers on the list (or you take the time to look through the links), you will see that there is some challenging work in there.

The statistics that my university system gives us, as faculty, is that something like sixty percent of our students are working mothers who are trying to improve their job situation, and thus, are back at school. That number is not always born out in my classes, but on the day I showed the images to my class, I would bet more than a third of the students had children of their own.

Again, if you know the photographers on the list, you can probably imaging the top-of-my head narrative I was giving: “This guy photographed Germans and had to run from the Nazis, this girl is Alice from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and the images weren’t so creepy in the 19th Century, this woman photographed her children and her books were banned as obscene, this guy was a well-to-do young french child who had a darkroom and camera when he was very young, this girl was exposed to mercury and suffered her entire life...” You can imagine the silence in the room when we got to the Daguerreotypes at the end of the list.

In the following days, I stopped to consider the absurdity of showing these images to students who really were expecting something much warmer and sweeter. I had tried to show photographers who were significant names in the history of photography (which is part of my job given that the course satisfies an arts elective). However, if you step out of your preconceptions of photo-history, the images are pretty horrific.

I think that those of us with children tend to filter a lot of what we see through our experience as parents. When I was twenty-five, I found sleeping baby images to be fascinating. Now that I have taken three a.m. trips to the emergency room with a colicky infant, I tend to see my own child laying in the images. And understand the heartbreak those 19th century parents must have felt.

I can also understand why my students were put off by the images.

Isn’t there a way to meet them halfway? To let them voice their love of pea-pod babies and still talk about Sally Mann? Is getting them to improve their own images of their children enough? It is, after all, why a lot of them are taking the class. Where do we find the balance between the images we devoured as graduate students, and the images our students are ready to see?

By the way, I regularly show a clip on YouTube from a PBS documentary about Jacob Riis. I know the voice of the narrator, but can never remember his name. At any rate, toward the end of the clip is a segment about infant mortality in New York at the turn of the century, with a description of mothers walking the streets at night holding children dieing of dysentery or T.B. I tear up a little in class when I show it now. Again, you always filter it through your own experience. Plus, the video has a sound glitch right at that point, which makes the whole room jump out of their seats. You can't embed the video, but it is here.

Legs, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Downtown, Chicago. 2010.

Update Photography I rubrics.

In Effective Grading; A Tool for Learning and Assessment, Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson lay out a strategy for using a system of rubrics to expedite grading and assessment. Walvoord and Anderson call their rubric system PTA Scales - Primary Trait Analysis Scales. The principal is simple. You can clearly articulate the traits you are looking for in student work. You describe, in plain language, several different levels of success for each of those traits. Each level of success is given a value. In effect, you have a tool for collecting data about your student’s success across the traits you are measuring.

You can use the PTA to articulate to students at the outset of a project what success or failure looks like. You can use the PTA to simplify and speed up grading. Most importantly, you can use the data you collect to measure student learning in your courses and as a basis for assessment of your courses.

If you’ve never read the book and you teach, go to Amazon now and order a copy. It was a career-changing discovery for me when I found it - it clarified so much that I had difficulty understanding about my courses. And on more than one occasion, I have used information gleaned from course assessment to make valuable changes to my classes. The PTA stuff is just the beginning, really.

At any rate, my Photography I assignments all have a PTA associated with them. Unfortunately, they were all written more than five years ago when I taught at another institution, in a different darkroom, with a different group of students.

Also, Rochester Community and Technical College has been making a big push on institutional assessment, and there are a lot of assessment tools floating around my job. The school seems to have agreed on a format for laying out these tools that is different than the ones I created on my own five years ago. I made a couple of major mistakes then, and finally felt like it was time to make some changes.

The rubrics I made originally were formatted vertically, with traits running down the page. They were really wordy. They tended to have incomplete, run-on sentences. They weren’t relevant to printing on RC paper and using easels with fixed borders, like we do here in the darkroom at RCTC. They ran across multiple pages. When it was time to use the rubrics for grading, I was intimidated. Imagine how my students felt about reading them on D2L.

You can find an original rubric here, for an artificial light project.

I wanted rubrics that were short and concise. I wanted rubrics that fit on one page. I wanted rubrics that looked more like what is quickly becoming RCTC’s institutional standard - a horizontal grid with values running across columns and traits running down rows. Most importantly, I need to update the content to reflect printing with RC paper, in fixed-border easels like we do in the RCTC darkroom. I wanted rubrics I wasn’t afraid to read when it was time to grade.

You can find the updated rubric here, for the same project.

I am always happy to share more rubrics or projects, leave a comment or send an email if you are interested in talking more.

Thomas Barrow, Charlotte Cotton and "The Amazing Fish Cam".

My friend Javier wrote me this morning with a link to an interview with Thomas Barrow by David Ondrik in issue nine of Finitefoto. You can find the article here.

I first read about Thomas Barrow in Jonathan Green’s American Photography: a Critical History 1945 to Present. I was a high school student in the mid 1980's in Albuquerque. I was also hanging around in the fine art museum at the University of New Mexico and I was very aware of Barrow’s work. I had read about it in Green’s book and realized there were more than a few Albuquerque connections to contemporary photography. If you grew up in Albuquerque in the 1980’s, you were amazed that Albuquerque had connections to anything contemporary; the fact that it dealt with photography and art was sort of a bonus.

Barrow has a really fascinating CV – He’s part of a lineage that goes right back to Beaumont Newhall and the invention of the history of photography. He was one of the reasons I so badly wanted to go to the University of New Mexico for graduate school.

I have always suspected that the generation of photographers like Barrow who founded MFA programs in the 1970’s boon of G.I. Bill money must have all been lovers, drinking buddies or mortal enemies. Their world was so small then, and they were busy defining what photography in academia would look like. They were also busy building the network of galleries and opportunities that would define the careers of art photographers for a couple of decades. They were movers and shakers, and at the beginning of the 1970’s, I bet there were about two dozen of them in the United Sates that really mattered. Just a guess.

So I was really interested in the quote below, from Barrow, because it touches, in a round about way, on something that I haven’t been able to articulate for a number of years.

“Nathan Lyons used to ask, when you’re looking at a picture do you see the picture or do you see what you want to see? Your eye really isn’t open to fresh things with photography, you have expectations with photos and they aren’t very great. I’m still disappointed after 40 years that people aren’t very demanding of photography.”

O.K. – be patient with me, as there is one other important anecdote.

In the early 1990’s the UNM art department had a room called “The Computer Closet”, which consisted of four or five Macs. It was the department’s early foray into digital imaging. But what the space was really used for was graduate students exploring this nifty new thing called “The Internet”, and thanks to Netscape 2.0, the Internet suddenly had pictures.

The Computer Closet was also next to Patrick Nagatani’s office, so Tom Barrow would frequently poke his head in and marvel at the complete lack of art-making happening on the expensive computers.

One day, he folded his hands together, shrugged his shoulders and sighed – “This Internet thing...it will be like C.B. radio. It’s a fad and in a few years it will be over.”

To be fair, at that moment, there were four graduate students looking at one computer showing something called “The Amazing Fish-Cam”. Someone at Netscape had set a camera up next to their fish tank and a computer would post an image on the web every minute or so. I’m pretty sure we graduate students thought it was hysterical. I think Barrow was disappointed in the waste of potential he saw in the room. In retrospect, I can appreciate that Barrow couldn’t foresee a world where a dot-com crash would soon have the power to wipe out his 401k.

I think we all understood that Photoshop would be a disruptive force for photographic image making. But no one in that small closet could have predicted the way that instant communication of images and ideas over the Internet would be so disruptive in their coming careers as artists.

It’s obvious now, that blogs and camera phones disrupt news and newsgathering. A slip of the tongue or a snide comment at a stump speech in the middle of nowhere ends a political career.

And the same thing happened to the gatekeepers and power structure of photography; or in this case, photography in the academy.

A new generation of gatekeepers came to photography after academic training in other fields. The Internet or the blog-o-sphere is where they found their voice. Jen Bekman and Jorge Colberg encapsulate the new power structure of photo as art. Bekman’s career of working in the web industry and starting a photo gallery after the dot-com bust is the ultimate refutation of Barrow’s early evaluation of the Internet’s potential. My understanding is that Colberg is a astrophysicist who came to an interest in photography later in his academic career. And he certainly champions work that is the polar opposite of what Barrow does.

I suspect another important change in the structure of photo gatekeeping was the publishing of Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art. The book is a narrative of photo-history that starts with the very last illustrations in Newhall or Rosenblum’s books and champions artists who they didn’t discuss much.

In fact, Cotton’s narrative starts at about the time I was sitting in a closet in Albuquerque laughing at a pair of fish belonging to a Netscape employee in Mountain View, California. That’s probably why reading her book took me so completely off-guard. I wasn’t out in the art world or the darkroom like I should have been. I was on the Internet in that closet looking at much, much more stupid stuff.

Like Cotton; Bekman, Colberg and the generation of photographers they are cultivating aren’t particularly beholden to the Newhall-Coke lineage of photography from which Barrow descends. They don’t really owe anything to Barrow’s generation of image makers – image makers like Robert Heinecken or Judith Golden or educators like Harold Jones. The L.A.- Chicago connection has lost ground to William Eggleston and Stephen Shore.

A new generation of photographers are also more likely to work with color, more likely to make inkjet prints, and less likely to cut their images apart and caulk them back together. They are photographers who are interested in the documentary qualities of photography. They are not to trying to disrupt a viewers assumptions about the photographic image – which is sort of key to Barrow's work.

I live and teach in the third largest city in a flyover state. From where I am sitting, having my work show up on Bekman or Colberg’s blog would be a much more valuable career moment than showing work at a place like the Etherton Gallery in Tucson or the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. The work would get instant, international exposure, and I might not have to print or frame anything. The career trajectory of new photographers seems to be that you pay money to go to a portfolio review, hoping to get your work on a blog, I’m not sure what the next step is after that. A Blurb book?

Let me say, also, that because I live in a flyover state, having access to Bekman and Colberg; or the discussion that Alec Soth, David Ondrik, Deywoud Bey, David Bram, James Pomerantz, Aline Smithson, the collective of voices at the now defunct NYMPHOTO and countless others foster have been a life line. It is now possible to participate in, or lurk near, a conversation about photography from some fairly remote places. Thank you.

Now if one of you would just point a web-cam at your fish tank.

Tom, if you stumble on this, I am sorry my writing hasn’t gotten any better since graduate seminar in 1994.

Balloon, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Some Tips for Exposing Film with Artificial Light.

My students are in the middle of an artificial light project as I write. I wanted a chance to jot down a couple of suggestions, there are some common problems that can be avoided with some foresight.

• Get a tripod. You will likely be exposing film at very long shutter times and your camera will move if you try to hand hold it. You can pick up an o.k. tripod at Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy or Ritz photo here in Rochester. Also, the Technology Services office in the atrium will check out tripods to RCTC students with a current I.D. There is no reason to do this project without a tripod.
• Use a cable release or your camera’s self-timer to trip the shutter. If you press the shutter with your finger while you are making a long exposure, you will make the whole camera shift. Even if you are using a tripod. A cable release is something you might still find at Ritz or Best Buy in Rochester, certainly, you could make a drive up to the cities and find one. Most of your cameras have self-timers, and that may be a better option.
• You will need to adjust your exposure time for something called “Reciprocity Failure”. Film reciprocity is the property of film that lets us change f-stop and shutter speed combinations and still have a good exposure. For example, f.8 @ 125 is the same exposure as f.11 @ 60. When you are making really long or really short exposures, that all breaks down. Above is a chart Kodak produces for Tri-X film which indicates how to adjust your time if your exposure is longer than a half a second. It should work well for the Arista Premium we are using in class. According to the chart, if your indicated exposure is ten seconds, you should either open up two stops in the aperture, or expose for fifty seconds to get the proper exposure.
• Meter for the light that is important. If you are photographing someone under a streetlight, be sure and walk right up to them and fill your viewfinder with their face. That will insure that the dark alley behind you isn’t throwing off your meter.
• Bracket, Bracket, Bracket. If your camera indicates an exposure of one full second, you should also make exposures for ten seconds and a minute. You probably can’t overexpose, so go crazy.
• Shoot one roll first, and take good notes. If you expose one roll under the lighting conditions you want to use, you can develop it by itself and figure out if you are on the right track before you invest too much time on the rest of the project. If you write down the frame number, f-stop and shutter speed, you will know which exposure times work and which don’t.
• Have some fun, dang it. See what weird light sources work - try your car headlights, or a car spot-light. Try glow sticks. Try a campfire. Try a flashlight.

Here is some inspiration:

• http://www.diyphotography.net/painting_with_light
• http://lightpainting.org/
• http://www.leschphotography.com/art/fineart/light_painting/index.php
• http://www.masters-of-photography.com/B/brassai/brassai.html
• http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=light+painting
• http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=artificial+light&m=text

What Digital Camera Should I Buy?

I get a number of emails or requests each month from people asking which digital camera they should buy for the color photography course at Rochester Community and Technical College. There isn’t an easy answer to that, especially given that most of the people who ask are on a student budget. Basically, a reasonable camera for the course should be capable of fully manual exposure, shoot in the RAW file format, and be a single lens reflex camera.

Here is a list of suggested cameras as of summer, 2010. The list isn’t comprehensive, and is totally biased by my own brand preferences. But here you go.

I will need to sell blood (<$600)

• The photography program at Rochester Community and Technical College has half a dozen Canon digital SLR cameras available for check out, and we pick up a few more each semester. You will have to put up with the inconvenience of bringing the camera back in every couple of days, but many students have gotten through the class this way.

• You are welcome to use color film in the camera you used for Photo I. You will have to pay for the film (and probably order it on-line) and pay for development. You will also have to factor in the time of scanning the roll to make a contact sheet and scanning the negatives for the final images. But it’s doable.

Good (around $600)

• Pentax K-x (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/PX06032/)
• Nikon D3000 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ0300/)
• Canon Rebel XS (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2827/)

Better ($600 - $1000)

• Canon EOS Rebel T1I EF-S (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2841/)
• Nikon D5000 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ0501/)

Best ($1000 - $2000)

• Canon EOS 7D (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC27101/)
• Canon EOS 50D (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2751KW/)
• Nikon D90 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ0091/)
• Nikon D300 Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ1305/)
• Pentax K-7 Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/PX0607/)
• Sony A850 Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/SZ0825/)

Seriously, I’m going pro ($2000 - $3000)

• Canon 5D Mark II Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2705/)
• Nikon D700 Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ1400/)
• Nikon D300 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ1306/)


Money is no object, and I only want the best (>$3000)

• Canon 5D Mark II (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2706/)
• Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2775/)
• Nikon D3S Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ240305/)
• Nikon D3X Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ24031/)
• Nikon D700 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ1401/)

Room. 2009.