Yesterday and today I've been at OETC's ITSC conference in Portland. This year, they managed to pull in David Pogue of the New York Times as their keynote speaker. On Monday, he lead a morning workshop on digital photography. In addition to being a very engaging speaker (he pretty much sounds the same as his videos with the identical demeanor and suspect attitude towards Microsoft) he lead a very interesting workshop.
Essentially, he demonstrated lots and lots of pictures and how he takes them (showing attendees how the images vary from camera to camera) and then what he does with them. For this audience, he focused primarily on iPhoto (but mentioned that Picassa does pretty much the same thing). A number of tips he passed along include:
- Always use the flash (even in daylight)
- When purchasing, look for sensor size not megapixels
- take lots and lots of pix (use the multi-shot feature for portraits)
- Turn off the screen (use the viewfinder if you have one - canon is one of the few who still do)
- Use the focus-feature of cameras where you hold the button down half-way to focus and the move the frame, etc
- Crop, crop, crop!
In terms of the cameras he discussed, for the pocket size ones, canon seemed to come out on top - in particular the A630 (which I was glad to hear as I bought an A600 for my brother last fall and am planning to buy a 630 or 700 this year). The Nikon did do a nice job of macro photos and the HP cameras seems resoundingly bad. All in all, a very interesting workshop and the type of presentation that I see far too rarely at education conferences. That is, Pogue didn't try to overtly "shoe-horn" these tools and tricks into an educational setting. Rather, he pointed out what can be done with this stuff (in particular how powerful aps like iPhoto are) and then left it more to the audience to place it in context. I think that worked very well. Many times, presenters try to point out just how to use this or that application for schools and the entire workshop ends up being a Q+A session as to how to make it work. Pogue's approach was much more an "open interface" approach: here's what you can do, here are some tools (for Mac, PC, Linux) and here are the results. Of course, there were still some "odd" questions, like one person who asked, "Is it okay to delete photos from my memory card once I download them to my computer?" Which, I suppose is just par for any course when you're presenting.
So what should we do