My name is Hans Põldoja and I am going to be your lecturer in the digital photography course. In Tallinn University my main role is being head of studies in the School of Digital Technologies and I am also teaching, supervising and doing research in the field of educational technology. I do not have any professional background in photography, but taking photos has been my hobby for 20+ years. I am mostly interested in travel, street, architecture and landscape photography. Teaching a photography course is going to be a new challenge for me and I hope to learn a lot during this process.
Basics of Digital Photography has been part of Crossmedia BA programme since 2012. This year I am taking the course over from Mati Mõttus, who has been teaching the course in previous years. I am also adjusting the format and content of the course according to my own photographic background.
We are moving the course from a computer lab to a lecture hall, but my aim is to organize it as a series of seminars where we can discuss and give feedback to the assignments. YouTube is full of good photography and photo editing tutorials. Instead of lecturing I am planning to choose the best recommended videos for you on each course topic.
In order to do the course assignments you should have access to a digital camera. Any camera which has manual settings and can shoot in RAW format is OK.
Earlier Photoshop has been used as a main software in this course. This year I am expecting that you will use your own laptops with the editing software that you have. I am going to use Adobe Lightroom as the main RAW editor, but I will also demonstrate the editing principles in Capture One Pro, DxO PhotoLab and Luminar AI. There are also several free software options for editing RAW photos.
As a final outcome of the course we will all build our photography portfolios which will be presented in the last meeting.