This is Allison Tyler Jones, and I am so excited to be teaching for Big Picture Scrapbooking for the 2008 year.

My class will be Capturing What You See and Feel Through Photography. This will be different than any other class that you've taken in photography before. We will be focusing on seeing life in new and exciting and different ways. Have you ever seen an amazing moment happen right in front of you? Maybe your kids just did something so cute and you thought, "Oh, I just wish that I had a camera and that I could have captured that." Or maybe you've seen an amazing photograph either in a magazine or in a museum somewhere that just really pulled at your heartstrings, or just made you have just a visceral reaction to that photograph, and you thought, "Oh, I wish I could take a photograph like that." Or maybe you've tried to do that, tried to duplicate the photo and take a picture and you're super excited about it. You thought it was going to be so cute and so good, and you had your camera and you're going to get it, and you take the picture and you look at the back of the camera and it is just so not what you wanted it to be. It didn't work out at all. Or maybe you're a bit more advanced, and you pretty much know how to get the goods. You know how to get decent light, get a few good pictures, but you're kind of struggling with what your style is, what is it that you want to do or say with your pictures. These are the issues that we will be addressing in our class this year. The lessons and the assignments that I will assign you will hopefully come out in art that happens to be your children, or art that happens to be your life. You will see actual photos from photo shoots that I have done in my own work, professionally, and we will talk about those and why I did what I did, and what decisions were made ahead of time to get those results, and what decisions more often were made on the fly when everything was going wrong to get those results. We'll talk about how each photograph was made, and go more into detail on those sorts of things. And, really, we will spend a lot of time on inspiration and emotion, and how to get emotion in a picture, because I think pretty much with digital photography these days, everybody can get a pretty decent picture. I'm sure you've probably found that. If you've shot film before and then gone to digital, you realize you can get pictures that you've never gotten before, and especially since you can look on the back of the camera, you are probably a better photographer than you ever have been, but do those images have the inspiration and emotion that you would like them to have. So, we will talk about that and how you can get that emotion without beating your children, for one. That would be a good way to think about it.

Then on the more technical side, we will be talking about light, and learning to see light, and learning to find light, and good places even around your home that you can find good light, and also how light can be very emotional and you can capture images with that light, and so many other things that it is impossible to tell you all about right now, but I hope that you'll look into it and sign up for the class, and we will have a great adventure together.

I think the most important thing that this class will bring is what you bring to it, your input, the assignments that you turn in, and as we all learn from each other and see the experiments that you have made and watch your own style and your own abilities grow, and you will be able to take better pictures than you have ever taken in your life. You will go away and be able to take better pictures than you ever thought possible. I know that that's true because I've seen this happen. I've taught quite a few photography classes in my life, and everybody always leaves and they go home and if they just do a few things that we talk about, they can immediately have better pictures.

So my goal for you this year, this 12 weeks that we're going to spend together, is for you to have art that happens to be your kid, or art that happens to be your life. So, when somebody walks into your home and you have these images blown up and they are hanging on your wall and they say, "Oh, my gosh, that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen, where did you get that?", or "Who was your photographer?", you can probably sit back and say that you actually took that photograph. That is my goal for you, and I think we will achieve that in 2008 together with Big Picture Scrapbooking.