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Postcards from the City: Exploration with Artistic Photography

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Postcards from the City: Exploration with Artistic Photography
9 Weeks | $425 | Online

Learn to take photographs of urban scenes and display your work in a form that is almost as old as photography itself—the photographic postcard. In Postcards from the Street, you will investigate our relationship with urban landscapes. Our senses are heightened when we are standing on a street corner, in a world that is constantly changing,transforming itself with every change of the traffic signals. This can be exciting and terrifying but never uninteresting. In order to learn effective Street Photography technique, we will be using a modified gear kit, a scaled down photographic arsenal, to both interact and document the light, color, shapes and shadows of our city as it reveals itself to us. We will study the origin and evolution of what is now called street photography and learn about the outstanding practitioners of this genre. We will also look at the nature of postcards to better understand how words and pictures, over time, have been a vehicle for communication and virtual experiences. This course will also have numerous, though not complicated, homework assignments as well as in-class assignments. A final class will feature a culmination of student vision and creativity from this fun and inspiring class. Our subject is the San Diego urban scene: streets, markets, buildings, parks, bridges and people in the landscape. This non-darkroom class is designed for beginning to advanced students. Instruction includes illustrated lectures, field trips, and critique sessions. You will make, write, and mail your own postcards to communicate..."Wish you were here!"

What You Will Learn:

  • Recognize Street Photography style in all aspects of photography they encounter going forward.
  • Incorporate that style into their own in both color and black-and-white photography, including implementing proper aperture and shutter speed and aperture settings to achieve desired tonal outcomes in black-and-white images as well as rich saturation in color images.
  • Develop a new appreciation for the unique nature of postcards as both a communication tool and historical documentation of societal interpersonal norms.


Quarters Offered: Winter | Online
Course Fee: $425
Prerequisite: Photo I: Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO (ART-40629).
Materials/Software/Hardware: Fully adjustable DSLR camera or prosumer camera. Creative Cloud Photography Plan required (or full Adobe Creative Cloud plan). Lightroom Classic needed (not Lightroom Creative Cloud) and Photoshop needed. Tripod and external hard drive recommended.
Note: Elective for Photography: Images and Techniques professional certificate. 
Contact: For more information about this course, please email unex-digital@ucsd.edu.

Course Number: ART-40165
Credit: 3.00 unit(s)
Related Certificate Programs: Photography: Images and Techniques

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