The Nature Photography Class

After 20+ years of surviving the real-world, for the first time, I sat through a 6-hour class today.  It reminded me of the promise I made back in May of 1990, when I told Rudi that I would never want to spend any more time of my precious life in a classroom.  Well, I have kept that promise til today.

Fred Drury, my instructor, is a well established photographer in the Chicago area.  I met him in my photography club, and have since decided to take his class.  He is a great photographer and a wonderful teacher.  His passion is landscape photography and has also done a lot of work in underwater photography.  The underwater photos he showed me were amazing.

Our first lecture was about Hyperfocal Focusing, where he taught us how to measure the distance between the camera lens and the foreground subject and calculate the hyperfocal distance to ensure crystal clear foreground and background subjects throughout the image.

The little data table he printed out for us threw me off a bit, and that's when I asked myself once again - how do we find value in the classroom?  To me, the schooling, knowledge and information is valuable only when it can help solve the real-world problems.

Here is the first "real" landscape photo I took with my point-and-shoot camera back in 2006 when I knew NOTHING about photography!  Would I take the same photo again today simply because this is a beautiful place?  Would I be thinking about the hyperfocal focusing technique?  Would I walk away from the scene without any photo because we are not supposed to shoot under the bright sunlight?!!