Digital SLR Cameras and Garage Band

This week I've enrolled in a digital photography class at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. If you know anything about the basics of photography, then you've heard about the triangle of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Essentially, from a technical perspective, the perfect picture is just the right combination of all three of these. But this represents just one aspect of the art of photography. You might say that these are the photographic equivalent of the National Standards in education. They are just "nuts and bolts," "knowledge and skills."

Sure most individuals simply want to "snap and go" with a $700 camera but there is more to it than that, isn't there? There's composition, what's in the frame. There are the elements of visual art (shape, line, color, pattern, etc). These represent more than the knowledge and the skills. They represent the imaginative and cognitive side of taking pictures. These relate to artistic vision, understanding how to communicate effectively via visual media. In order to capture a moment that everyone is drawn to, a photograph that takes their breath away, it takes something more than knowing ISOs or shutter speeds or f-stops. It takes a human mind that sees something is a way no one else can.

When you see a photograph that is stunning it's probably because the photographer took the time to think and consider, and not one who was "snap happy." The same idea is true for those who use Garage Band. Sure, kids and adults can put sounds together so that the elements of music (rhythm, melody, harmony, form, and instrumentation) work together but that's just the "nuts and bolts" of music, it's the National Standards of music. What's missing in these types of thrown together, point and click compositions/creations is the cognitive and imaginative side of the art of music.

As technology pushes traditional approaches to music education to the periphery, rest assured that it cannot replace the cognitive, imaginative, and innovative mind. And, if this is so, then might we want to begin highlighting and educating those aspects of musical interaction and cognition that no machine can duplicate, especially when we consider that technology grows exponentially?

Graphic taken from: http://www.nobadfoto.com/understanding-exposure.html