tex wrote:
Great Bustard wrote:
tex wrote:
# 2 is wrong on its face. #3 is mostly wrong. #1 sounds great, until you dig: What is taught to people has to be carefully calibrated to what the goals of the "course" are and what the audience is. So, there are situations in which # 1 could be "wrong", because information overload can be just as dangerous as too little information or incorrect information. The outcome will likely be the same: confusion.
In the case of exposure, does the correct explanation, that the exposure is the density of light falling on the sensor and that the ISO setting pre-processes that light, result in "information overload"?
Well, this is not what this poll was asking---although it's a poll begun within a certain context, shall we say? The direct answer to
your question is still, possibly yes. The audience is important. What sort of beginners? Recently, because of my LightZone Project work, I've had to start learning Drupal. It's not rocket science, but I will say that in a number of the "beginners" classes I've been to, stuff has sailed right over my head---and been in another galaxy for some of the other people. In those beginners classes, it is assumed you have some working knowledge of web page design already, plus HTML5, CSS, and maybe PHP. Other times it's been so basic to be boring. So, this isn't as black and white as you may think, and calibrating material carefully to the intended audience is not as easy as some people think. How many really great teachers did you have? Probably few enough that they really stand out. And as you yourself said said in another thread, commenting on an OP's question about how much he had to know, technically, your answer was that he really didn't need to know this stuff at all to take good pictures.
In the above sentence, I can see lots of "beginners" wondering what is meant by "density" and "pre-processes", engendering a sidebar discussion that moves off into physics, electrical engineering, & etc. Then they might wonder how this related to the controls on the camera. This would not be the way any army I know of would go about teaching raw recruits how to handle a gun. And it wouldn't be a description I'd use for certain groups of people. For others, a far more fleshed out and exacting description might be more desirable.
The problem with this poll is that it skirts the area of "loaded question" and logical fallacy. It's true of a lot of polls, the questions being so limited and un-nuanced so as to shoehorn people into responding a particular way, even though that is not how they actually feel. it's a common legal tactic as well.
Let's just limit the poll to "exposure", then. How say you?
I go back to the audience. Just who are they? Middle schoolers? Affluent middle schoolers or ghetto middle schoolers? People in a retirement community with their first non P&S camera? Harried soccer moms? Executives like my father (A brilliant man in business, but there is no way he'd have the patience to listen to any of this....)? My mother wouldn't understand it at all. BTW, she was the creator and first executive producer of Wall Street Week, B.S. U of MD, Phi Beta Kappa, MLA Johns Hopkins, Fulbright Scholar. Her most advanced camera for close to 3 decades was an Instamatic (which was really mine, dammit!). Recently she upgraded to a POS P&S.
I think the poll is meaningless the way it is written (and actually I strongly suspect disingenuous, based on its rhetoric...) because I can imagine so many different "beginners". My decade's worth of college teaching reinforces this in my mind. Having said that, I wouldn't hesitate to use the above description to a collegiate beginning photography class, because I could safely assume that the students would have had enough science to comprehend it without having to explain it further.
