CAPC stands for Commercial Application of Photography for Creatives

It is a course run by Tonic at UCA and is an opportunity to have 15 lectures over 3 months. It is teaching the basics of photography for commercial application: product promotion, glamour portraits, fashion shoot .
More importantly, it is teaching  camera settings, use of lighting equipment, shooting indoors and outdoors etc.
One of this program's requirements is to keep notes and research for later evidence, which is nothing new for the CG course student. Therefore I'll be using this blog for storing the notes on lectures and progress. 

I'm  very much looking forward to these couple of hours a week, for the program is suiting my major project's brief: animated presentation of human character , which will benefit from getting some knowledge of  body presentation , studio lighting setups and so on.

Lecture 1/15: Introduction to Pre-history and Early Years of Photography:
 Interesting history of man's fascination watching image of reality instead of the reality itself and the attempt to create such system to capture the present.

One of the more interesting points was camera obscura - a light phenomenon to recreate the full image of the world if it is passing through a tiny hole. For example if all the windows were to be covered and only one small dot allows the light through, you would get the full view of outside two times bigger and upside down:

Or the daguerreotype photography, an early method for taking pictures at 1838. They would use a silver plate, which is reflecting as a mirror and  with special chemicals on, to expose to light and have someone sit in front of it for good 18 minutes for the image to 'bake in' and stay there. Every time the silver plate is exposed to light, it is at the same time reflecting and exposing the photographed image. The quality if it is somewhat very special, and the person feels almost alive in the picture.

More of such images can be seen at museum of the moving image

Other interesting topic was cameras.

Impressive SLR  camera Zenit, being an old pre-second world war creation still better than most of the digital cameras we have today.

And introduction to Haselblad camera phenomena. Swedish Haselblad cameras being so phenomenally good, that they are the only ones taken for NASA's flight to the Moon. Very surprisingly UCA too, has such cameras

Classes in the future should have some more hands-on experience.