Last week I showed about some of the tools we use to create light at Marywood, with our Basic and Intermediate Black and White courses. In addition to your Photography classes, you will take Art Foundation classes and General Education classes from Marywood’s Liberal Arts Core.

Sophomore year starts with Advanced Black and White Photography. This is very fun course, and your path as a ‘Light Jedi’ is near complete. First off you get to play with some really old style cameras called the View Camera. They come in many different sizes like Medium format 4×5 cameras and large format 8×10 cameras. I took a couple pictures to show you what the large format camera looks like. It is a great conversation starter when people see you crawl under the big cape-like hood. People are amused and the same old remark as “wow, I didn’t think people still used that old type photography; everyone uses digital now.” Here is where I smile and say digital is nice but I let them look through the view screen and everyone is amazed how detailed the screen is. The detail that you can get with a large format camera with a ƒ64 lens is something you have to see. Anyway I said you are almost a full Light Jedi after this course. Here you learn the “zone system” and you really start to take responsibility for every picture you take. You can’t take a billion photos like you can with your digital camera…well you can, and just it will cost you an arm and a leg!

Here are a couple pictures of the school’s medium format camera you get to use. This kind of camera is high on my wish list but they come with a hefty price tag. Oh if you have one of these things just lying around in your attic, let me know I will be right over.

Sassy (my dog) loves her picture taken! Bella (my other dog) on the couch gets sad when she isn’t the star of the show.

Once again this post is getting long so I will finish up and next week we can talk about more. If there is anything you would like to see or know about, just give me a holler.