Cool. The instructor is Angela Rowlings, a professional photographer. Among other things, she freelances for the AP and does weddings. She showed us some pictures of hers, a lot of which are on her Web site. A little googling turns up that she is likely a 1993 graduate of Boston Latin, which puts her around my age. She's been teaching the class for about a year.

Our first assignment is to do portraits. Outside, against a plain background, one on a sunny day and one on a cloudy day, with the sun to our backs. And we're supposed to bracket the picture one stop up and one stop down, while keeping the shutter speed at 1/125 second. So, this probably means I'll be doing this at work. My first preference would be for someone I know who works in the same building, so, if you're reading this, feel free to volunteer. Second preference is a co-worker. Third preference is some random person in Copley Square.

Almost everyone in the class has a newer, motorized camera, with the ability to do all sorts of automatic settings. I think I might have the oldest camera in the class. The instructor has moved completely over to digital. She says film still gives you better quality, but the SLR digital cameras are good enough for the kind of work she does (i.e., not fine art museum-quality pieces). A quick look at Best Buy's Web site shows digital SLR cameras starting at $1000 and going well up from there. Um, yeah, I'll stick with my film camera and my $200 digital camera for now. I don't think I'll ever do this professionally, so that'll probably be good enough forever. But we'll see.