Course Information

The Digital Photography DeCal, EECS98/198, is a DeCal course currently being offered for the Fall 2007 semester at UC Berkeley. Broadly, the focus of this course is on the technology and technique of digital photography - while Berkeley offers mainly classes on the the aesthetics, art, and story-telling ability of photography, this class takes photography from a practical standpoint, defining and teaching the various effects and attributes found in images, and discovering how to define and manipulate them.

Classes will meet every Thursday, 6:30-8:30PM, in 310 Hearst Mining (on the northside of campus)
Instructor: Nathan Yan
Contact email: nathanyan@berkeley.edu
See the course syllabus for more detailed info

Course Philosophy
The class will focus on three key areas:

Technology of Camera Systems
Photographic Technqiue
Digital Lightroom

The pragmatic aim of the course is to help students take better pictures. To that end, for this course the underlying foundation of photography will lie in a firm grounding in the technology behind the camera system - how exactly the camera works to convert light into a digital image. By understanding the science behind the operation of the camera will give much more insight into traditional photographic techniques, and HOW they actually work. For example, many photographers know that higher ISO causes more noise. In mathematical terms, this is akin to knowing that there's a certain function f(x), and f(2)=7, f(5)=13, f(7)=17, yet never knowing what f(x) actually is. This class aims to define that actual function, to give students an actual understanding into how photography works, rather than a simple awareness of cause and effect.

In addition to technology and technique, this class will also delve into the "Digital Lightroom". With film photography, shooting the photograph is simply step 1 towards creating the image. After this, film must be developed in the darkroom, where it's possibly to drastically alter the final output of the image - oftentimes the resulting image can be more a product of darkroom development than original exposure. In today's day and age, the art of the darkroom is somewhat forgotten - the photography process for many people ends with exposure, after which the film is simply given to a processing lab and the prints are picked up later. This trend is perhaps even more prevalent with digital photography, where the image is shot and instantly rendered available in a viewable form. Yet, as with film and the darkroom, digital has its own "lightroom" that is needed to develop raw electronic signals into a readable digital image. While this process is usually done in-camera, image editing software - the modern day digital lightroom - offers untold possibilities to manipulate and fine-tune images, much like the darkroom can do for film.

About the Instructor
The instructor (or rather, student facilitator) for this course is Nathan Yan, a 2nd-year Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) student.

[Switching to 1st person, as writing about one's self in 3rd person is painfully awkward]

I know a lot of instructors write these sections for you to "get to know" them a bit better. If this happens, all the better, but the main purpose is for you to get an idea of my background so that you can take the course and the things I teach in context. As a student myself, and coming from an engineering-first background, it's important to keep in mind throughout this course that the extent of my knowledge is somewhat limited, and my approach or philosophy comes from an exacting, oftentimes black *or* white, scientific background.

As an EECS student and a photographer, my background is a hybrid of both the technological elements of modern digital camera systems and the traditional techniques of photography, which is the aim of this course: teaching engineers how to apply their technological knowledge to practical use, and giving photographers an understanding of technology, so they can apply this to their existing photographic technique (although we likely have more of the latter this semester).

As a 2nd year student, my engineering background is a bit limited. So far in my EECS studies I've taken only CS courses, and will be starting with EE40 (circuits) and EE20N (signals & systems) this semester. Thus, some of the actual technology might be explained in grossly oversimplified, borderline analagous, terms. Thankfully, most of the hard technological material was covered in Week 1, and oftentimes in this course an oversimplification or even analogy will be sufficient enough to express the concept.

As for photography background, I started the same way as most of you probably did - playing around with a more-or-less automatic ("point and shoot") camera, and gradually working my way up to more manual control. I have probably been shooting photos "seriously" for about 1 year, when I first began using a digital SLR (single lens reflex) type camera, although I had probably been studying camera technology for a long time before that. I have worked as a photographer for the Daily Californian newspaper for the past year, shooting all kinds of news and sports events, and have done some extensive work shooting for local schools, especially theatre.

My photography experience consists exclusively of digital photography. In some ways, it's beneficial in that my approach is not bogged down by older film conventions, although I'm admittedly completely ignorant to the nuances of film photography and especially darkroom development. One of the biggest "context points" to keep in mind is that I'm very heavy into software processing of photos, and thus I'm perhaps far more forgiving of limitations or problems when capturing images, knowing they can be fixed in post-processing.