This was our last meeting before the Christmas break and it inevitably was influenced by the holiday spirit! We began by exchanging our Secret Santa gifts. We continued by getting to know the work and life of the monstre sacré of photography, Henri Cartier Bresson. An all-encompassing repetition of technical subjects to solve any questions that might pop up and fill the theory gaps of those who missed a few meetings. Lastly, we took a group photo.

Just like every photographer that... respects himself, we got the, so called, “normal” lens. It’s no coincidence that top photographers like Henri Cartier Bresson used this lens rather often, if not exclusively.

"If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money" writes Andrei Tarkovsky in his book “Sculpting in time”. This opinion of his doesn’t need a lot of comments, yet we began our lesson by discussing it. Afterwards we occupied ourselves with the work of Gary Winogrand, who was quite possibly the photographer who enjoyed the process of shooting photos more than any other, especially if we take into consideration the fact that he shot hundreds of thousands of pictures that he never saw printed! Then we relaxed by doing the draw for the clubs Secret Santa which will take place next Sunday as Christmas is drawing closer. We can’t wait for it! After that we got to know the use of various filters like the colour ones on black & white photography, the UV filter, the polarising filter and the neutral density filters. The usual critique...

Today’s meeting begun by expanding upon the histogram; an important tool allows us to check if our picture is properly illuminated. Then, we analysed the functions that cameras offer us and specifically the “PSAM” functions. After that we saw the best photos our members shot during November as well as the one that Mr.Vassileios Dodis chose to be the best of the month. Subsequently we tested our knowledge on some technical matters, so as the programs coordinator teacher can be sure that we’ve understood them. In the following picture you can see us fill in the test’s questions. Dough! What do we have here? Is somebody cheating? A presentation of Robert’s Frank’s work followed. Did you know that during his trip, that lead to the infamous book of his, “The Americans” being published, he traveled for 16,000 km and shot 767 films worth of pictures? After all that a little recreation was necessary as you can see in the pictures below: At some p...

How does a photometer work? Do the values it recommends always lead to the right exposure? And if not, what do we have to do to correct the exposure? What do High Dynamic Range and exposure compensation mean? These are the technical matters that we occupied ourselves with at the beginning of today’s meeting. Afterwards, we got to know the work of one of the pioneers of photography, Eugene Atget. We finished by critiquing photos members of our team have shot, a procedure that absorbed us so much that we even forgot to shoot any photos! Unbelievable isn’t it? Unbelievable yet true! To be precise though, there might have been a few that played the goat with the camera a little bit...