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Get thee to an art museum!

With all of this talk the past week about learning from photography I wanted to share an even more effective piece of advice when it comes to the increasing sill with regards to good design. Luckily it’s a simple one.

Get thee to an art museum! I’m serious. Find some local art museums and actually put a visit on the calendar, bonus points if you can get your boss to approve an outing on company time, and another set of bonus points if you can move exceptionally slow through the museum by yourself.

Our local museum currently has an exhibit on illustrator N.C. Wyeth. With Treasure Island being a favorite in our house I knew I needed to take my boys. And I’m going to be making a return trip solo soon. Because while Wyeth is quoted as saying “Painting [or fine art] and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other.” I completely disagree.

Exploring the world of fine art can indeed help with improving our design efforts.

ISO Explained

There was a bit of confusing and I received a few questions yesterday regarding ISO and what exactly it is and how it works. In this video, I delve a little deeper.

ISO is easiest to visualize when we consider film photography. ISO literally refers to the size of the silver halide crystals that are on the plastic film. The smaller the crystals the smaller the ISO number and the larger the crystals the larger the ISO.

So what effect does the size of the crystals have on the images? The larger crystals are more light-sensitive so they can absorb more light and need less light to produce a quality image, the smaller crystals need more light to produce the same image. The trade-off comes in the form of graininess in the image. The original “pixilation” if you will. Now grainy photos can be quite cool, especially if you’re aiming for spooky fall photos but not so cool when you’re trying to get technical details so the ISO choices will largely depend on what you’re trying to achieve in your photography.

Generally speaking though the lower the ISO the better with regards to detail.

In digital photography, we don’t swap out our light sensor for one that is more or less sensitive to light so what happens is the computer in the camera will computationally boost the values of the light hitting the sensor in low light situations or if the ISO is manually increased. The effect as anyone who’s taken a low light photo with a smartphone will notice is a grainy photo. Since the effect is almost exactly the same as in the film the name and paradigm work well in both instances.

The Exposure Triangle

Photography and video are important components of instructional design. As we look at some of the things that photography can help us with regarding good visual design overall as well as good instructional design it would be a mistake not to share one of the more important photography concepts.

This is the exposure triangle. We’ve all seen images that were overexposed and a bit too bright and images that were a bit underexposed or a bit dark. So today I wanted to discuss the three elements that make up the exposure triangle in photography.

The first element is the shutter speed. This is literally the speed at which the shutter moves out of the way and lets light pass through to the film or these days to the light sensor. The slower the shutter speed the more light but also the more likely that images seem blurry due to movement.

The second element is the aperture. The camera’s aperture works just like the pupil in our eyes, it opens and closes to let in more or less light. We discussed this a few days ago when we discussed the depth of field, the trade-off with light and the aperture has to do with the depth of field your image sill have.

The third element is ISO. ISO can be a bit confusing but it refers to the light sensitivity of your film or the artificial light enhancement done in the computer part of your digital camera.

Another bit of photography composition advice that is useful for instructional design is the idea to simplify whenever possible. Remove as much as possible. This allows for focus on the subject, removes unnecessary elements to reduce cognitive load, and gives you a cleaner overall design.

Another important aspect of photography and composition has to do with backgrounds. Essentially the backgrounds in our visual work should not distract our learners. We should be focused on our subject and the backgrounds our images should be used to give context if necessary but we need to be aware of them and not forget to check for distracting or inappropriate items in the background of the media we make. This is also another good analogy for the instructional content. We should include useful background information that can give context but it should not distract our learners.

Today I wanted to discuss an important photography and videography concept. Depth of field. I’ve been asked quite often about how to get the “blurry background” when photographing or recording video of a subject. In this video, I discuss the concept of depth of field. In essence, the depth of field is how “deep” the field of focus will be in an image. This is controlled primarily through adjusting the aperture. The larger the aperture (ironically the smaller the f-stop number) the more narrow the depth of field and the smaller the aperture (again larger f-stop number) the wider the depth of field will be.