One thing to keep in mind when considering this class is that CPC requires students to shoot with a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens—at least for DP-I. Most digital SLRs show up with an 18-55mm zoom nowadays, so most students will have to spring for another lens in addition to the cost of the class. Although it adds a few bucks to the expense, I don’t see the purchase of the lens as a bad thing. A 50mm prime is something of a classic for a reason (in fact, this website owes its name to that particular lens), and anyone who’s serious about photography will probably end up owning one sooner or later anyway.

On to the review. First, I have to say that everyone at CPC was really nice. As a group, they clearly care about photography and making sure that the students enjoy the experience. I never asked a question I couldn’t find someone to answer, and one staff member even went out of her way to make sure that I had the proper paperwork to turn in to my employer so I could be covered under our tuition reimbursement program.

The bulk of the facility is an acutely triangular main floor (it’s a v-shaped building built between two angled streets). The space is divided loosely into a classroom area, a front desk, meeting tables, and a gallery. The computer lab is located upstairs in what is really kind of a wallless loft. I believe the darkroom is in the basement, but I was taking a digital class and never had the need nor the opportunity to look around downstairs.

All of the open space makes for a bit of an odd learning environment. The “classroom” is a windowed area right next to the main doors, which is probably good for street exposure, but the lack of walls and constant hubbub make it difficult to hear the instructor sometimes. Conversely, when you’re upstairs in the computer lab, you seem to be able to hear everything going on in the classroom down below. More than once some of us joked “He’s using the same script!” or “He’s funnier on Thursdays; he must like this class better.”

The course itself is broken up into two distinct parts: the classroom and the lab. The classroom portion is currently offered on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday evenings. These sessions are essentially interchangeable—I had to skip my regular Monday night class due to car trouble, and just showed up on Tuesday. No problem. William Benson was the teacher for all three sessions, and he’s a professional photographer with a studio a few blocks down the street.

One thing to keep in mind is that the lab portion of the course is at least as big a commitment, if not more so, than the classroom. The labs are taught by volunteers—usually two per lab. Space limitations in the lab mean that changing labs—once you sign up—is a minor ordeal. In general, if you can’t make a lab session, you are supposed to e-mail people from the lab you’d like to switch to. If no one is willing to trade, you contact the person in charge of the labs to see if she can work something out.

I live about an hour’s travel from CPC, and I had convinced myself beforehand that I may not need to attend all of the labs. That was naive. The labs focus on Adobe Lightroom and printing with high-end Epson printers, and there is quite a bit of teaching and interaction in the lab sessions. In short, there was no way to simulate the lab at home. Anyone thinking of taking Digital Photo I, at least, should bear in mind that he or she is committing to a minimum two days a week, plus the time needed to complete the assignments.

In general, students learn about one particular aspect of photography during a single class session. The topic might be motion and its relationship to shutter speed, or how depth of field relates to aperture and distance. An assignment—usually a “roll” of about 50 photos—is due two weeks later, which gives students time to get out and shoot, then go into the lab and print. Most assignments require the students to bring in two contrasting photos (for example, one showing blurred motion and one demonstrating frozen motion), plus a “favorite” that can be pretty much anything.

The class sessions generally follow this format: students pass their favorite photos around so everyone gets a chance to see them. Then everyone breaks off into groups of five or so to discuss the photos from the assignment given two weeks earlier. After a break, the class is given a lecture on that evening’s topic.

Although the instructor clearly knew his stuff, I would have liked to have seen a little more depth to the lectures, and I know that a few of the other students said the same thing. I tend to learn best when given a “why” to go along with the “do this,” but sometimes the “why” part was lacking.

This leads me to my primary complaint. Although the CPC website states that the classes will usually run about 3 hours, we were often out in two. I can understand trimming some depth from the lesson plan if you’re slamming into the far wall of the allotted class time, but we rarely (if ever) did that. To his credit, I don’t think William was trying to shoo us out; he often stayed late after class to talk and answer questions. I suspect that part of the problem, at least, was that the original instructor planned for our course was replaced on short notice right before the course began.

Additionally, we spent a good hour or more of our first night of the eight-week course setting up our cameras (CPC likes standardization, at least in Digital Photo I). On the second night, the class was split into two in order to give us tours of the computer lab. That was fine, but the students in the half of the class not touring the lab were pretty much left to their own devices for 45 minutes or so. During the second-to-last class, we took a half hour or so to fill out evaluation forms. And the last class served as a wrap-up, with a dinner and a open discussion. In all, there was a surprising amount of down time considering the cost of tuition.

So in the end, was the course worth it? I would give it a qualified thumbs-up. I’ve been something of a photo hobbyist for a long time and I’ve read a bit on the subject, and I certainly managed to come away from the class with a number of new ideas. It also helped me quantify some of the things I already thought I knew. I guess the bottom line is: did it make me a better photographer? Time will tell, of course, but I strongly suspect it did.

CPC is in the difficult position of trying to be most things to most people. My classmates ranged from people who knew almost nothing about using an SLR, to people who had been shooting film and digital for years. Any class with that wide of a target audience is bound to be too basic for some and over the heads of others.

I’m not convinced that the small-group photo discussions were as valuable as CPC thinks they are. I do agree that it’s good to get in the habit of having your work criticized—as William pointed out, it’s easy to find people to stroke you, but you learn more when someone tells you what he or she doesn’t like about your photo. On the other hand, some of us were still trying to figure out what makes a good photo, so I think we felt like we were blundering in the dark as we tried to form an decent opinion and explain it to someone else.

My wish list for the course would include a more solid lesson plan. That applies to both the classroom and lab portions. The lab assistants were enthusiastic to the nth degree, but some were more knowledgeable than others, and it was clear that the students in some labs ended up with a better knowledge base than others.

The final item on my wish list? Well, Digital Photo II is always on Wednesdays, apparently. That’s the one day a week I can’t make, so DP-II is out of the question for me—at least for the foreseeable future. And I’d definitely like to take it sometime.

Given the unlikelihood of scoring an autograph from one of the aforementioned dignitaries, I decided to skip the tourist map and meander alone across the cemetery grounds. October is the best time of year to be poking around by yourself in an aging cemetery, and the mood would have been absolutely perfect had the sun not come a-shinin’ through about 20 minutes after I started walking.

I had been given a lead on a particularly creepy-looking shrouded statue not too far from the entrance, and that’s what I was seeking before the sun turned everything into Happy Contrast City. By the time I found the monument, it had been transformed from ghoulish nightmare to something that might be sold in miniature with a thermometer glued to its back in the Magic Kingdom.

After about 10 minutes of body gyrations that failed to coax an itinerant cloud into a position between me and the sun, I gave up and moved on. I decided to try to make the contrast work for me, so I started focusing on interesting bits of masonry and architectural wonders.

The great thing about being me is that I’m always finding something fascinating to stop and look at. It’s not really ADD–I just hate to miss anything that might be gone next time I come back. This particular personality quirk does little for physical fitness and tends to drive my friends crazy in museums, but it also means that I didn’t have to move more than about 10 feet at any given time to find something I wanted to photograph.

So over the next three hours or so, I shot a lot of pictures. I shot headstones and towers, mausoleums and goofy things that looked like stone tree stumps. Washington Monument-looking things, iron gates, and crumbling sections of brick. I climbed hills, laid down on the ground, and aimed my camera into the sky. And when it finally got late and I had to go, and the other meetup geeks were passing me on their way to gather for lunch, I was still probably no more than 800 feet inside the front gate.

I guess I’m going to have to go back there sometime.

I recently ordered a filter from Adorama–a retailer based in New York. Obviously, the company has been around for quite a while, so someone must be happy with them, but I wasn’t. For those who want to skip to the end, I did eventually receive my package, so you can count that as one weight lifted from the shoulders of the world.

My tale begins, as many do, at Amazon.com. I was looking for a nice UV filter for my nice zoom lens, and I chose a B+W. The price was right, and the filter was actually being sold through Amazon by Adorama.

Adorama shipped the filter quickly. I ordered it on September 24, and by September 27, online tracking told me that it was sitting in a UPS facility near the building where I work.

Then it disappeared.

I’ll point out right away that it wasn’t UPS that lost it–at least not directly. Adorama shipped my package through a service called UPS “Mail Innovations.” (I insist on using quotes around the name, because I believe it’s meant to be ironic.) In this system, UPS hands off the package to the US Postal Service for final delivery.

I could write an entire column about how silly this is. Suffice to say that I work five minutes from O’Hare Airport–one of the largest transportation hubs on the planet. There is a UPS truck at my building at least twice a day, five days a week. I understand that UPS “Mail Innovations” might make sense delivering to a rural area that doesn’t see many UPS trucks, but it makes no sense whatsoever in Rosemont, IL.

So UPS gives the package to the Post Office and it drops from radar. It’s gone. I gave them a few days before I called the postal facility to ask if they would consider delivering my package anytime soon, and if not, might I be able to just come pick it up? A very personable man on the other end runs the tracking number and tells me that the package must have been misrouted. It will probably be scanned at some other facility before being rerouted back to me.

No problem. I understand that both UPS and USPS deal with hundreds of millions of packages, and no matter how hard they try, some are bound to get misplaced. It’s disappointing, but it’s a fact of life.

At this point, it’s Wednesday, October 1. I decided to contact Adorama’s customer service department to let them know that UPS “Mail Innovations” isn’t innovative at all, and in the future, I’d be willing to pay a couple of extra bucks to have my packages delivered the old-fashioned way.

You can’t e-mail them directly, though. They have a web form that you fill out and it e-mails the relevant department. So I filled out the form explaining my situation and hit “submit.”

A few minutes later, I received an e-mail explaining that the company is closed for Rosh Hashana and will reopen in a few days. They aren’t accepting any e-mail during the holiday, so please resubmit on Friday if the matter is still relevant. They apologize for any inconvenience.

Inconvenience? I just wrote four paragraphs and they were deleted faster than the package I haven’t received.

I have no problem with Adorama being closed for the holiday. In fact, I respect it. But I don’t think the same courtesy should be extended to the company’s e-mail servers. If e-mail servers really do need to be shut down under religious law, then the least the company can do is announce that fact on its website and…wait for it…turn off the e-mail-to-oblivion customer service interface.

Fortunately, I still had my browser window open. I was able to back up a few pages to copy and save my note.

On Friday, still no sign of the package, so I went to the Adorama site again and pasted my original text into the window, updated to reflect the two-day delay. In an hour or so, I received an e-mail from an Adorama employee asking for more info. After a few exchanges, he told me that he had contacted USPS, which would be conducting a search for my package. If nothing turned up within eight business days, we could revisit the situation. I asked about canceling my order and starting fresh, and he told me we could discuss that when when the eight business days were up on October 15.

Sounds like a brush-off to me. Let’s see what happens, and we’ll deal with you if the problem doesn’t fix itself.

Five more days of stewing and I sent another note to Adorama. I’m done, I said. I had planned to use the filter during the previous weekend’s shoot and I never received it. Let’s just cut our losses. Refund my card, we’ll call it a no-fault draw, and maybe we can do business in the future.

That was Wednesday, October 8, otherwise known as Yom Kippur. I had just written another well-thought out note to the Adorama customer service department, and it had again been deleted. Please resubmit on Friday if the matter is still relevant. We apologize for any inconvenience. ARRGH! Punk’d again!

This time I had closed my browser window, so I lost what I wrote. Fantastic. I kept stewing until Friday. I planned to write them a shiny new tirade telling them what they could do with their web interface. And before I could get around to it, the package showed up in my mailbox. Like magic. A mere two weeks after it came to towns.

What did I learn? I learned that I will avoid items that are shipped through UPS “Mail Innovations.” I learned that I should copy and save any long note before I submit it via a web form. Adorama learned nothing. And for that reason, I learned that I won’t be dealing with them again.

I’m taking a photo class, you see. If I had the foresight to know that I’d want to blog about it say…a month ago, I could have fired up this site and regaled you with grand stories about my adventures during the first three weeks of my class. Instead, I begin my tale in medias res, during Week 4. You and I will both just have to go on with our lives pretending that nothing of any import happened during the first few weeks. In a year, you’ll be swept up in the storyline and have forgotten all about the fact that you missed the introductory episodes, at least until you access the bonus materials on the DVD.

Ahem. My photo class. Digital 1, they call it, and I’ll let you decide what the name means. Our assignment this week, should we have chosen to accept it, was to experiment with depth of field. We had to shoot a set photos that showed our subject in his/her/its environment, as well as a set that used depth of field to separate the subject from the environment.

Depth of field is something that I’ve played with for years. Some of the first photos of my own I ever liked used depth of field techniques to highlight plants in the Forest Preserves. Digital cameras make things ever so much easier, of course, so I celebrated the assignment by taking some of my worst photos ever.

It was hardly my fault. That’s not entirely true. It was entirely my fault. My current schedule consists of work, sleep, and photography class. I have little time for the aikido class I haven’t given up on, nor the band I continue to play in, nor the various side jobs that keep me from eating mac and cheese every night.

The long and short of it is I didn’t get the chance to wander my neighborhood in search of photogenic torn-down laundromats, as one of my classmates did. I didn’t have the opportunity to take pictures of tractors, friends, rows of cakes arranged on a table, or an adorable little dog. What I did have time for was dragging my old Minolta into the back yard where I could photograph it in front of some weeds. I also had time to stand my bicycle against the neighbor’s house. And a few close-ups of the weeds just for good measure. Two hours before lab tonight.

Great art, it ain’t.

But what challenge is there in trying to print an interesting photo? How much more can I learn from trying to get just the right contrast out of a bike seat against a brick wall? To draw the viewer in; to provide him with some profound and radical understanding of his place in civilization; to make sure I didn’t overexpose the sunny wall of the garage in the background. These are the things that matter. These are the things I achieved today. One out of three, anyway. Almost.