Film Studies: MMC 106 Introduction to Visual Language: Photography & Videography

Unit 1: Basic Aspects of Visual Culture

Painting:

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – Selected Reading

Perspective and Renaissance Painting

Impressionism
Avant Garde Art- Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism

Graphiti as Art and Resistance

Photography:

Development of Photography
Genres of Photography – Candid, Glamour, Wildlife, Sport and War

Analogue and Digital
Aesthetics of Photography – Composition, light, frame, color and monochrome effects
Study of Photographers and their work – Henri Cartier-Bresson and Raghu Rai

(Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Robert Doisneau, Robert Frank, Elliott Erwitt, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Brassaï, André Kertész, Steve McCurry, Annie Leibovitz, Vivian Maier, Eugène Atget, Sebastião Salgado, Man Ray, Garry Winogrand, Martine Franck (Cartier's Spouse), Helmut Newton, William Klein, Irving Penn, Walker Evans, William Eggleston, W. Eugene Smith)
Unit 2: Optics & Chemistry of photography

Image formation, view finder cameras, twin lens cameras, single lens cameras Types of lenses
Aperture, exposure time, film speed, exposure meters
Image formation in available light, Lighting, Image formation in artificial light Developing, printing and enlargement of photographs
Dark room techniques, chemicals used in developing and printing

Unit 3: Digital photography and photo editing

Digital image formation, auto mode Vs. manual mode, comparasion of digital and analogue techniques, capturing motion, photo editing using Photo Shop

Unit 4: The Video Camera

Types of video cameras

Basic operation of a video camera,

What's SD, HD, Full HD, Ultra HD?

Videotapes (images)
Tapeless (DVD, SD card, Solid State, optical disk, etc)

Analog TV standards (PAL, NTSC, VHS etc) + Analog tape formats

Digital TV standards (VCD, DVD, HDTV etc) + Digital tape formats

Films (2K, 4K, 6K)

Suggested projects: Analysing camera and lighting pattern in a chosen film; analysing a chosen photographer’s work; a project based on family portraits or family albums

MMC 107 Still Photography & Videography Lab

Familiarization with a view finder camera, DSLR camera
Choosing SD cards
Exposure meter (Scroll down)
Exercise of doing a photo essay
Familiarization with artificial lights, an exercise in lighting
Familiarization with video camera and its basic operations
Exercise of doing a 10 shot exercise

EXPOSURE METER / LIGHT METER

Almost every camera on today's market has a light meter inside. It's that thing on the bottom that has the ‘plus’ on right hand side & the minus on the left and then a spot right in the middle, that's theoretically the proper exposure.

If you see that your light meter is all the way to the ‘plus’ side that means your photo is going to be over exposed. What does overexposed mean well it means you're letting too much light in and that your image is going to be too bright.

Now conversely on the other side if you go all the way to the minus think about it it means that your image is going to be under exposed and when it's underexposed it means you're not letting enough light in

If it's right in the middle technically that's saying that that is the proper exposure now keep in mind it's a good starting point what's happening with your light meter is that it's taking the brightest scene the brightest part of the scene and the darkest part of the scene and giving you

the average which is technically right in the middle of the light meter.

Now you can make tweaks here or there to make sure that you have the right exposure but this is a basic way to get your right exposure is to line it up right in the middle so as you can see the light meter is something that you should take a look at.

In AUTO mode, your light meter can be controlled by the exposure triangle as you change your shutter speed or your aperture or your ISO, the light meter is going to be affected by that.

Exposure