I spent most of today working on my class preparation for Saturday’s first session of a photography workshop called From Seeing to Image: Taking Better Photos with Any Camera//Part One. It’s sponsored by the d.a.i., the same group that sponsored my lecture last week. Like the lecture, the workshop will be conducted in English. I’m happy to report that the workshop is now completely sold out, with even one more than the original limit, for a total of 16. Should be fun!

Part of the first session is learning about “foreground” and “background”, and how to use a camera to emphasize one or the other. I teach tricks about how to do that with any type of camera using the “Portrait” scene mode that most digital cameras, both “point and shoot” and digital SLR cameras come with. The idea is to take a “portrait” of an object you want to emphasize; by default, the camera will automatically blur out the background. With a bit of practice, people I’ve taught this to have gotten the concept and been able to apply it to taking photos of objects as well as people.

Photos, of course, make the best visual aids for explaining the effect we’re shooting for — pun intended, couldn’t help myself, sorry.  Below are some of the photos that I’ve used recently when I’ve taught about this idea .They show what I call the  “locks of love”, the padlocks that lovers leave on bridges all over the world as symbols of their eternal devotion. A columnist in a British newspaper recently wrote about this, bemoaning this trend and urging people not to buy locks for their lovers for Valentines Day. He blamed people in Paris for starting it, but  my research a few years ago revealed it came from an Italian book and movie. Ah well — at least I always get interesting photos from the locks, so personally I can’t complain about seeing them everywhere.

Anyway, given the subject of the photos, I thought it was a fun theme for a post on Valentine’s Day. Have a happy day with the one you love – with or without your own lock of love. 😉