 Hey guys and welcome to your introductory photography course here at Halvorsity and we're gonna start out this entire course we're gonna cover a lot of ground in this course and this is though still a basic photography course so we really want to start at the very beginning and for me the very beginning would mean defining what photography means so how we first take a look at the word itself take close look you can see as where I put kind of a space here there's actually a space here between the two words this mostly is because I'm got bad handwriting but if you take a look you see photo and graphy two words and if you're a little bit familiar with English you've seen this graphy attached to lots of other different words that aren't photo but let's take a look at photo photo is a Greek word for light and light not in the sense of heavy or light but set light in the sense of the sun like what you see with your eye and then you've got graphy over here and graphy sort of means something along the lines of drawing so when you put those two things together you come up with drawing with light which I think is a really great way of describing what photography is photography really is in a lot of ways drawing with light now what would be sort of a more functional working definition of photography so to answer that I took a really quick look in Google kind of hopped around I came across a definition in the world English dictionary and so has two pieces the first piece is the process of recording images on sensitized material by the action of light x-rays and etc. and it also is the chemical processing of this material to produce a print a slide or a cinefilm so basically they're just saying light or some sort of ray because you notice they said x-rays well light plus film equals photo or photography now the other definition is basically the act of doing this so the art or practice the occupation of taking photographs or making films so we're just going to say the act of doing that right there alright so that is your definition of photography how about we go take a look at who are photographers what are the different styles of photography and who are the people doing photography so let's start out again we're gonna we're gonna take a look here at styles so styles of photography and these have a lot to do with approach these not necessarily maybe the look of the photo but the actual way that the photograph is being made and this is really important distinction for you young photographers out there to understand difference between different types of photographers so we're gonna just start out by writing them all out so we've got art photography we've got documentary photography and we have got over here commercial photography and I'm actually going to put one more group over here we're going to call that the x group because I'll talk about that in a minute so let's start with the art photographers art photography is basically created with the artist in mind the photographer is then using art or using photography to express themselves so using it to somehow push the boundaries of the visual world that we're experiencing so art photography is in many ways about the photographer then you've got documentary photography and documentary photography and this is according to maybe one of the sort of one of my mentors is about the subject so you'll also hear this being called reportage it has a lot to do with documenting the situation in a sort of as neutral a way as possible and making the story about the about the person being documented it's a report it's like the way a reporter would work for a newspaper or a magazine or something like that now you've also got commercial photography now commercial photography is sort of it's definitely a very much a growing piece of the photography world it has had its heydays and it's had times when it's been it's always been around but in many ways commercial photography in recent years has also started to blend with these two in ways that it hasn't before but commercial photography is photography that's being done with a certain customer in mind and it's often got some sort of advertising component to it so the photos are either being sold to a private person who is buying your time as a photographer though maybe you're shooting a wedding or something like that so they're paying for you to take photos of that particular thing or they are paying you to make some sort of image or paying for an image that you made in another style but using it for advertisement so that's a very important thing it has a lot to do with promotion you can think of commercial photography as being sort of promotional photography maybe and then we've got this kind of other group over here which I haven't really defined yet and I'm not really going to but the X group is basically people who are using photography to make sort of public record it's not documentary in the sense it's not really for a magazine or something like that but maybe police officers or salesmen people like that who are using photography in their work but not necessarily in these formats over here so I'm just gonna leave that as the X group I haven't found it anywhere on the internet so I'm just gonna not even give it a name but I just want to make you all aware that that's out there alright so you can do all of these different styles of photography in a couple different ways these days I mean in the modern world we have everybody knows we have digital photography so this is the way that most of us are taking photographs these days but that's actually not that old I mean when I was a kid you didn't have digital cameras you had film cameras and so film cameras were how photography was performed for a long time you also have and this is kind of comes as a surprise to some people you also have video some people are like wow video is that photography well yeah it's photography it's just photography that happens to be moving at about 24 pictures per second or so alright so how about we go take a look at some different examples of photography here we have got Ansel Adams and Ansel Adams was an American photographer in the 19 or sorry in the 20th century and Ansel Adams is sort of your quintessential landscape photographer and he was shooting that in the style so like we said before in a style of an art photographer now sometimes Ansel Adams did the occasional commercial piece or something like that but in general he was a landscape photographer who was an art photographer so landscape was his specialty it was the sort of the thing that he liked to photograph his specialty but he was an art photographer this photo right here is actually sort of not too controversial but somewhat controversial because it kind of breaks some of the rules of of the documentary of the documentary and art photography sort of boundary it was made by a woman named Dorothea Lange Dorothea was a photographer and during the depression in the United States was a time back in the 30s when everyone ran out of money everyone was very poor and the government basically went around and hired artists to do projects Dorothea Lange was sent out with her camera through the United States to take photographs and this is one of her most famous probably is the most famous photograph that she ever took and it's called the migrant mother now I'm using this photo as an example of the difference between art photography and documentary photography because you could approach this situation in two different ways if you are Dorothea Lange you walk up to this woman you say ma'am is it alright if I follow you for a while and take some photographs of you and then you would proceed to take photographs while this woman was going about her day and if Dorothea or you as a photographer don't affect this person in any way by trying to make them pose or make them do anything extra for you if you tell them don't tell them to sit and put their hand on their chin and look out across the the prairie then that is a documentary photograph so if you are trying to document things as they are happening without influencing and that's really important or doing the least you can to influence you can never really truly not influence a situation but you do that then you are basically working as a documentary photographer that can be art photography but you're shooting in the style of documentary now if you were to walk up to this woman here and say I'd like to take some pictures of you and then tell her well I'd like you to put your hand on your chin and look out across the prairie and kids if you could put your head sort of on her shoulder or behind her back that'd be great thanks and then take some photos that would then in that case no longer be a documentary photograph that is well I guess you could call it art photography but it's no longer documentary in the sense that we think of it today back in the time when Dorothea Lange was working the rules about this were there but they weren't necessarily as strict as they are these days and so you know what whatever that whatever ended up happening with the story whether this is a documentary photograph or an art photograph in many ways it has become over time no matter what happened sort of seen as a documentary photograph because it captures a time and an emotion and a piece of American history in a way that's very unique but it's just one thing to think about as you're approaching these the difference between documentary and art photography now here right this photo would be a classic example of documentary that's sort of like an art artistic documentary photo is taken by one of really my favorite photographers I love this guy his name is Henry Carilla presson he's a French guy who worked as a photojournalist for my favorites I spell his name wrong he's a French photographer who worked for big photo agencies back he was one of the founders of Magnum which is a huge photo agency very important in the history of photography and you can see here that you can shoot in documentary style so this is a documentary photograph but that it can still be artistic that is totally cool you can be artistic doesn't necessarily be an art photograph so what makes this photo artistic well I really love this photo because you have all these great shapes you've got this guy this is statue is a very famous artist apparently at the time got this guy's legs look at his legs and then look at the artist legs and look at his posture same thing and almost in a way and I'm not sure if this was necessarily intentional but I also looking into it also see this line here and this line here and this line here you can see there's just really interesting shapes going on there and this is typical Henry Carilla bosson he has better photos I think this isn't one of his best ones this is just one that was in the open domain but you just always are seeing this in his work and a lot of documentary photographers do very artistic work but they're also doing it in a way that they're not telling the guy hey could you go back and walk and do that again and again and again they just catch it the what the first time that it happens now we're going to move into commercial photography so this is these two things that you're seeing right here are most certainly or often are commercial so most of the wedding photography that you see unless you're shooting it as a photojournalist for a magazine or something like that if you're being hired by the bride or most likely by the bride's father you are working as a commercial photography her commercial photographer sorry lots of saying photography today all right so wedding photography is very often commercial it can be otherwise but it's generally commercial fashion is also a very big piece of commercial photography these days it's everywhere it's probably in the Western world one of the types of photography that we see the most fashion photography can be journalistic if you're being sent by a paper or a magazine to document an event but very often you're being paid by maybe the maker of this pair of pants or these fancy shoes or these fancy red shoes wow look at those you might be being paid by the makers of those or some sort of maybe the people who are putting on the show up here maybe you know this rich guy over here wants some photos whatever the case is you're working as a commercial photographer often in these situations and the difference between those is who's paying you essentially all right and when you think about photographers I think a lot of people have a lot of different ideas what is a photographer and a lot of times you kind of imagine this guy with his massive lens right here it's just really ridiculous you kind of imagine these guys and in a lot of ways yeah those people are photographers but there's lots of different ways of being a photographer it's always been the case you have guys like this from back in the day who were doing portrait studios you have people like this right here who's does a Turkish photographer who does a lot of art photography she's using a medium format camera here and you have everything in between you have people who and you also have people who are outside of the professional world who are just working as amateurs so there you have it that was your introduction to the very basics of photography we're going to move on in the next lesson to the history of photography for right now you can check out more videos at alversity.org