The ROCKY MOUNTAIN SCHOOL OF PHOTOGRAPHY Free Lecture at the SPRINGFIELD ART MUSEUM

      The Rocky Mountain School of Photography is a family-owned school of photography based in Missoula, Montana. The school opened its doors in 1989 and has, since the beginning, been about people.  So its no surprise that they have a  people-first approach to education. I recently had an opportunity to attend a free Rocky Mountain School of Photography workshop. It was held at the Springfield Art Museum on Friday February twenty seventh . The topic of this workshop was improving your photography by breaking the rules of photography. The two-hour lecture explored the practice of not being bound by the typical schools of thought followed by most photographers and was very informative and entertaining.Rules or standard accepted concepts are all through the field of photography however when planned and executed correctly some of your best photos might not comply. Things like not having unfocused objects in your foreground or that sharp images are always the best were challenged. Techniques like fogging your lens with your breath or shooting subject matter that was looking out of frame or walking through the frame were considered. Many unorthodox ideas were embraced in this liberating change in photographic philosophy.

The speaker (whose name I failed to remember) talked extensively on all aspects of photography like the golden rectangle or the golden points and how you should control the composition and content of the photos you take. A lot of considerations to deliberately making the eye go from one point of a picture to another and then back was given.I was very impressed with the perspective of rule breaking as a good thing and will be using several if not more of the ideas offered to try and spice up some of my own work. It was a very informative and entertaining experience. If given the time I would definitely like to attend a weekend workshop in the future but until then I’m excited to use a few of these new tricks for some of the assignments in this and the photo two class I am also taking this term.  The slideshow that was presented was very informative and I was a little surprised that some of the stuff like using the rule of thirds and golden rectangle and power points were all things that I had just learned in  my basic design class. A few other things that were discussed like graphic vectors and actual vectors or z axis were techniques that I studied last term in Concepts of Visual Literacy. I thought that was pretty cool because I was able to follow what was being discussed with a much better understanding than I would have been had I not recently become aware of these concepts and techniques.All in all it was a enjoyable evening activity that I was able to take my girlfriend to and just get out of the house and away from the computer for a couple hours and learn a few new things as well ‘’BONUS’’!!