Digital Media | Spotlight: Photography | Inside Aperture | Blogs
Aperture in the Classroom
Next semester I have agreed to work for the Photographic and Electronic Media department's computer lab. I will be tasked with general oversight of the lab, and will be offering a series of short workshops for the students in my program.
Our lab is pretty nice as it is, but I have plenty ideas for improvements. I plan to set up a really useful video editing workstation, complete with a 32" HD TV monitor, dual cinema displays and a nice sound system. Next to that I am also planning to set up a really powerful still photo editing station, complete with a color corrected mini-viewing booth, an Epson 2200 for proof printing and much, much more.
However, one of the things I would really like to introduce into our lab is Aperture. To be fair I will also be showing off Lightroom as an alternative. Most of the the students in my program have either never heard of Aperture, or just don't really understand how it can help them.
So, for one of the scheduled workshops we are planning to do, I am going to be showing off Aperture, Lightroom, and the basic ideas behind a non-destructive workflow. I'm pretty used to doing this type of thing in a seminar style workshop, where I put Aperture up on the projector and go through it's main points. However, I would really like to set up the lab with trial versions of the app so everyone can sit down and give it a test drive.
To do this I was thinking of just asking each student to bring a portable hard drive to store their library and image files. Using a managed library scheme with Aperture makes this really easy to do as it will appear as just a single file on their drives.
So, I just took a look at what types of portable drives were available at the moment. Wow, you can get a 320 Gig portable drive from Western Digital for less than $100! Not only that, but I just saw an add for a 24Gig USB thumb drive for $24. Simply amazing. 24 Gig is large enough for a moderate library by itself. To be able to cary it around on your keychain is pretty impressive!
Anyway, if the students take a liking to Aperture and or Lightroom I am sure the school will wind up getting a volume license so we can have it permanently installed on all the machines in the lab.
So, I am wondering, if you had to teach Aperture to a bunch of photography students who had never even heard of it, how would you approach it? What would you show off first? What would you hold back on? Aperture is such a robust and rich environment, that I don't want it to wind up overwhelming everyone.
What do you all think?
2 Comments
Leave a comment
Stay Connected
©2009, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (707) 827-7000 / (800) 998-9938 All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. |
About O'Reilly
Academic Solutions Authors Contacts Customer Service Jobs Newsletters O'Reilly Labs Press Room Privacy Policy RSS Feeds Terms of Service User Groups Writing for O'Reilly |
Content Archive Business Technology Computer Technology Microsoft Mobile Network Operating System Digital Photography Programming Software Web Web Design |
More O'Reilly Sites
O'Reilly Radar Ignite Tools of Change for Publishing Digital Media Inside iPhone O'Reilly FYI makezine.com craftzine.com hackszine.com perl.com xml.com Partner Sites InsideRIA java.net O'Reilly Insights on Forbes.com |
I would focus initially on Aperture's import and organization capabilities. Importing is the first step in doing anything with your digital photos. Editing with Aperture and it's 3rd party plug-ins is the next step, and there is a lot of power there, but hook them with organization (imports, projects, folders, reference files, keywords, rating, stacks, etc.) aspects of Aperture first. That is really Aperture's purpose as a program anyway (as it is Lightroom's).
Good luck
Even if these are photography students, how many of them have an extensive portfolio to organize and will instantly latch onto this as the reason to use the app? In my experience, especially with students new to their major/program, you've got to hook them with the glitz and ease of editing to make drastic improvements on their photos.
I would suggest that after demoing how to make changes on your sample, have some different versions of the sample set up to show what each change did to the photo, and show a 7-up preview (or whatever number of photos you have) to hammer home the editing ability.
Now, for students who already to have a fair number of photos, probably just thrown into a project folder on their machines, they're more likely to appreciate metadata and how quickly you can pull up relevant photos when you're developing an album or collection for a project, not to mention tools like the Light Table and book (paginated media) editor.
My advise for teaching has always been to tailor your content to each particular audience as best you can. That's really what all effective speakers have in common.
A part of me wants to hold back with spreading Aperture around; it's been my secret weapon for getting a lot more work done in shorter period of time compared to the competition. However, who am I to deprive kids paying for an education. ;-)
Better to invest in effective tools from the get-go than to learn the lesson the hard way later after working with slower ones. If they can keep everything organized from the very beginning, it will make their careers so much easier later on. There comes a point, though, when you have to ask if the tool makes it so easy to catch on, what real relevance does a university education have when you're working for yourself? :-\ I say this as someone who does photography work on the side, and didn't spend the money for classes ;-).