DrCrypt
10-13-2003, 03:14 AM
I'd appreciate it if the Quarter to Three denizenship could lend me their expertise.
I have a friend who is an accomplished photographer in Ireland. As part of his charity work, he teaches photography courses to teenagers who come from broken homes, drug addiction, teenage pregnancies, etc. These courses are primarily aimed at composition and framing techniques, as opposed to highly technical photography stuff. He just wants to teach people how to take interesting, good-looking pictures. The way the course works is that one week, everyone will go out and take a bunch of pictures and turn in the film to be developed for them. Next week, they are handed a box of slides of the pictures they took, as well as a small light box, and they are asked to find two to three pictures that they would like to present to the class as ones they are especially pleased with, and also to find two to three pictures that they think could have turned out better. Then they get feedback and suggestions from the class and, at the end of the course, present their work at a professional photography gallery.
At any rate, my friend has been teaching this course up until now with standard cameras and film, but he wants to move over to digital photography. There are a couple of issues with this:
a) He doesn't know anything about digital photography
b) He has remedial computer skills... for example, he checks his email on a black and white Mac.
c) His students will almost definitely have even more remedial computer skills.
Basically, his specs are that he wants to mimic as much as possible the "box of slides and a lightbox" approach. I don't think this is really a problem, as long as the digital camera has a decent browser that will allow students to see images of their photographs and select the ones that they want to present. The user inteface for this camera would have to be very intuitive and easy for a completely untechnical student to grasp. The camera itself would have to be able to produce a decent A4-sized print and he would want the camera to be more wide-angled than long, so minimal zoom capabilities.
He will also need to purchase a high-quality digital projector. At the very least, he needs this to have a decent keystone and brightness adjustment settings.
The other aspect to this equation is his own computer ignorance. He originally asked me to put together a package where the digital projector would interface directly with the cameras, but I talked some sense into him and he now plans on purchasing an Apple laptop to project these from. So any digital camers and projectors need to be Apple compliant. Furthermore, since he isn't particularly good at any of this stuff, the ability to present digital photographs from the Apple would have to be very intuitive, as would actually -gathering- the photos from the cameras in the class. Basically, the students need to be able to indicate which slides they wish to present and he needs to be able to quickly, one after another, load them from their camera for presentation. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is - perhaps a fast media card reader?
The last issue is cost. Not including the laptop (I assume), his budget is around €5000 (around $6,000). This needs to purchase twelve digital cameras and the projector. To help offset this, my friend has contacts at Fuji and Yashica who can give him generous discounts. So projectors/cameras from those guys would probably be preferred.
Could anyone recommend a package here that would fulfill the above specs? Also, could people recommend some good digital camera web sites where I could find similar recommendations? Just to reiterate: the number one priority is ease-of-use and intuitive interfaces. Thanks in advance.
I have a friend who is an accomplished photographer in Ireland. As part of his charity work, he teaches photography courses to teenagers who come from broken homes, drug addiction, teenage pregnancies, etc. These courses are primarily aimed at composition and framing techniques, as opposed to highly technical photography stuff. He just wants to teach people how to take interesting, good-looking pictures. The way the course works is that one week, everyone will go out and take a bunch of pictures and turn in the film to be developed for them. Next week, they are handed a box of slides of the pictures they took, as well as a small light box, and they are asked to find two to three pictures that they would like to present to the class as ones they are especially pleased with, and also to find two to three pictures that they think could have turned out better. Then they get feedback and suggestions from the class and, at the end of the course, present their work at a professional photography gallery.
At any rate, my friend has been teaching this course up until now with standard cameras and film, but he wants to move over to digital photography. There are a couple of issues with this:
a) He doesn't know anything about digital photography
b) He has remedial computer skills... for example, he checks his email on a black and white Mac.
c) His students will almost definitely have even more remedial computer skills.
Basically, his specs are that he wants to mimic as much as possible the "box of slides and a lightbox" approach. I don't think this is really a problem, as long as the digital camera has a decent browser that will allow students to see images of their photographs and select the ones that they want to present. The user inteface for this camera would have to be very intuitive and easy for a completely untechnical student to grasp. The camera itself would have to be able to produce a decent A4-sized print and he would want the camera to be more wide-angled than long, so minimal zoom capabilities.
He will also need to purchase a high-quality digital projector. At the very least, he needs this to have a decent keystone and brightness adjustment settings.
The other aspect to this equation is his own computer ignorance. He originally asked me to put together a package where the digital projector would interface directly with the cameras, but I talked some sense into him and he now plans on purchasing an Apple laptop to project these from. So any digital camers and projectors need to be Apple compliant. Furthermore, since he isn't particularly good at any of this stuff, the ability to present digital photographs from the Apple would have to be very intuitive, as would actually -gathering- the photos from the cameras in the class. Basically, the students need to be able to indicate which slides they wish to present and he needs to be able to quickly, one after another, load them from their camera for presentation. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is - perhaps a fast media card reader?
The last issue is cost. Not including the laptop (I assume), his budget is around €5000 (around $6,000). This needs to purchase twelve digital cameras and the projector. To help offset this, my friend has contacts at Fuji and Yashica who can give him generous discounts. So projectors/cameras from those guys would probably be preferred.
Could anyone recommend a package here that would fulfill the above specs? Also, could people recommend some good digital camera web sites where I could find similar recommendations? Just to reiterate: the number one priority is ease-of-use and intuitive interfaces. Thanks in advance.