I think the depth of field assignment was extremely helpful due to it being at the beginning of the course. This assignment was very simple but allowed me to get a great grasp on handling my camera at the beginning of the year. This gave me the opportunity to really become comfortable with different settings on my camera so that I could use this knowledge throughout all other projects during the semester.
I would add some type of outing as a class or a few sessions photographing projects together. I feel that a big part of photography is field work and learning what works on the fly. If the class were to take an outing together, Professor Chupa would be able to give us real time feed back and therefore allow us to increase the quality of our shots. I always feel like I have questions when I’m out shooting – such as wonderings about overexposure, bad focus, lack of clarity, etc and this would allow us to quickly address them with professor and correct our mistakes in real time.
I think this would be a good replacement for the flat lay assignment, given that it is still towards the beginning of the semester, when most students probably aren’t that comfortable with their camera yet. I feel like the flat lay assignment wasn’t needed that much because it is a very specific type of photography that other than the assignment, we didn’t really learn about in general. given that there wasn’t much content around this assignment other than the shots themselves, it wasn’t a very attention grabbing assignment and one that allowed for pretty random shots.