Walsworth teaches Walsworth. This is everything that happens before a photo ever reaches it.
Every photo you will ever take is the same negotiation between three numbers.
A camera has exactly one job: let in the right amount of light. There are three ways to control that, and each one costs you something different. That is the entire subject. Everything else is practice.
Manual mode with Auto ISO. You pick the shutter speed and the aperture, because those two decide what the photo looks like. The camera picks the ISO, because that one is just damage control. This is how most working photographers shoot and it removes two thirds of the panic.
Four letters, and only one of them is the house setting. The rest are training wheels or traps.
Sony and Nikon call them A and S. Canon calls the exact same things Av and Tv, for aperture value and time value. Same modes, different letters, and it is the single most common reason somebody picks the wrong one on the Rebel.
Knowing what shutter speed does is useless if you cannot find it in the dark, thirty seconds before tip-off.
Put every body in M first. Then:
A or the body dial does nothing1/500 so the camera never quietly drops below a usable shutter speed on youThe one everybody complains about, and it is one habit rather than a real problem: ISO is a hold-and-turn, not a dial.
The genuinely awkward one, because it only has one dial, so aperture needs a modifier button.
Av ±, back of the camera) and turn the main dialBefore you shoot anything that matters, change all three settings without looking at the camera. In a gym you are watching the game, not the top plate, and the difference between a photographer and someone holding a camera is whether they had to look down.
If a dial does nothing, you are in the wrong mode. The aperture dial is inert in S/Tv, and the shutter dial is inert in A/Av. The camera is not broken, it is doing exactly what the dial told it.
How long the sensor is awake. It decides whether motion is a person or a smear.
The number you actually need to remember: 1/500. Below that, moving people start to smear. Basketball and volleyball want 1/500 to 1/800. Football and track outdoors can take 1/1000 because there is light to spare. A kid sitting in a classroom is fine at 1/125.
Slower lets in more light, which is why your instinct in a dark gym is to slow down. That instinct is wrong and it is how you come back with two hundred blurry photos. Keep the shutter fast, open the aperture, and let ISO take the hit.
How wide the lens opens. It decides how much light gets in, and how much of the photo is sharp.
Wide open (small f-number) does two things at once. It floods the sensor with light, which saves you in a gym. And it makes the in-focus band very thin, so your subject is sharp and the background dissolves. That is the look people mean when they say a photo looks professional.
Stopped down (big f-number) does the opposite. Less light, but a deep band of sharpness. Use it when you need everybody in a group photo to be in focus at the same time, which is most of the time in a yearbook.
How hard the camera amplifies whatever light it got. Free brightness, paid for in grain.
Shutter and aperture control real light. ISO does not: it turns up the volume on the signal that already arrived, and like any volume knob it brings the hiss up with the music. That hiss is noise, and it looks like colored static in the shadows.
Do not be scared of it. A slightly noisy photo of the winning shot is a photo. A clean blurry one is nothing. The full frame bodies stay usable to ISO 6400 and often past it, and Lightroom cleans up more than you would think.
Protect the shutter first, then the aperture, and let ISO absorb the rest. Every bad gym photo in the history of this program came from doing that backwards.
One subject that pops, or a whole scene that holds together. Pick on purpose.
Open the aperture wide, get closer to your subject, and put distance between them and the background. A longer lens exaggerates it further.
Use it for: portraits, a single player, a hand on an instrument, anything where the background is noise.
Stop down to f/8 or f/11, step back, and use a wider lens. More light needed, so this is an outdoors move or a tripod move.
Use it for: group shots, a whole classroom, a set, anything where the context is the story.
Autofocus matters more than either. Set the camera to continuous autofocus (AF-C on Sony and Nikon, AI Servo on Canon) for anything that moves, which at a school is nearly everything. Single-shot AF locks once and then quietly lies to you as your subject walks out of the plane you focused on.
The body captures. The lens decides what the photo is.
Crop factor is not a downgrade, it is a different framing. A 50mm behaves like a 75mm on the A6700 and about an 80mm on the T5. That makes crop bodies great for reaching across a gym and bad for fitting a whole classroom in.
And the mounts do not cross. Sony is E, Canon is EF/EF-S, Nikon is Z. A Canon lens will not go on a Sony body, it will not work if you force it, and the camera is not broken. Grab the lens that came with the body.
Four situations cover almost everything in this book. These are starting points, not gospel. Take one frame, look at the back of the camera, adjust.
Why: a gym is far darker than your eyes believe and the people in it are sprinting. This is the hardest lighting in the building and the reason most school sports photos are bad.
Shoot from low, at the baseline, and wait for faces rather than backs. Anything above 1/500 and under ISO 12800 will clean up fine in Lightroom.
Why: a lit face on a black stage fools the camera's meter completely. Spot metering tells it to expose for the face and let the rest go dark, which is what your eye is doing anyway.
No flash, ever. It kills the lighting design, it blinds the performers, and you will be asked to leave.
Why: you finally have light to spare, so spend it on a fast shutter. The problem flips from darkness to contrast: white skies and black eye sockets.
Shoot with the sun behind you or find open shade. Overcast is not bad weather, it is the best light you will get all year.
Why: fluorescent light is dim and green, and you are a guest in somebody's lesson. Silent shutter if the body has it.
The real technique here is patience. Everyone performs for the first two minutes and then forgets you exist. The photos worth having are all after that.
Seven of them, one per gate cycle, week one each month. Mandatory for everyone in Content and for Outreach photo. Everyone else is welcome and it counts toward your hours.
Each one is a short lesson and then a real deliverable that gets scored on the same three criteria as everything else in this class: On time, Correct, Complete, 1 to 5. They are not busywork. Every single one produces something the book or the feed actually uses.
You learn: the three dials, the mode dial, and where every control lives on your assigned body. RAW on, card verified.
You turn in: six frames of one subject, straight out of camera, no editing. The same subject at 1/60 and 1/800. The same subject at your widest aperture and f/11. The same subject at ISO 100 and ISO 6400. Plus a screenshot of the card showing .ARW, .NEF or .CR2 files.
Scored on: whether the six frames actually demonstrate the three differences, and whether you shot RAW. If your two shutter frames look identical you did not change the setting, you changed the mode.
You learn: Lightroom Classic. Import with ADD, flag with P and X, filter to flagged, fix exposure and white balance, Sync Settings across a batch, export through the class preset.
You turn in: one real event folder, correctly named, with originals and selects populated, the link posted to PHOTO DRIVE LINKS in the right format, and at least 40 frames culled down to no more than 20.
Scored on: the cull, not the edit. Twenty good frames beats sixty mediocre ones, and turning in everything you shot is not a selection.
You learn: the hardest lighting in the building. Auto ISO with a shutter floor, continuous AF, burst, shooting from the baseline, and why your instinct to slow the shutter is wrong.
You turn in: one home game covered end to end. Ten usable frames, at least four with faces, at least two of the bench or the crowd.
Scored on: usable, meaning sharp enough to print at half a page. This is the workshop that decides whether the sports section is any good, and it is the one people skip.
You learn: portraits and interviews. Where to put someone so the light works, how to ask a question that gets a real answer, how to get a name spelled right the first time.
You turn in: a portrait of somebody you did not already know, plus three usable quotes from them with the name confirmed in writing.
Scored on: the quotes as much as the photo. “It was fun” is not a quote. And a misspelled name here is the same misspelled name that gets printed a thousand times.
You learn: that a page needs a dominant, verticals, horizontals, a detail, and space for text. You are not taking photos, you are filling a layout somebody drafted.
You turn in: a shot list built from a real approved draft, then the photos that satisfy it: one dominant, two verticals, two horizontals, one detail.
Scored on: whether a designer could actually build the spread from your take without asking you for anything else. This is the workshop that connects Outreach to Design.
You learn: RGB versus CMYK, why your neon comes back dusty, resolution versus DPI, and what the export preset is actually doing.
You turn in: the same photo exported three ways, correct to spec, at half resolution, and in the wrong color mode, with one sentence on each explaining what a printer would do with it.
Scored on: whether you can explain the failure, not just produce it. Anyone can export wrong. Knowing which wrong is a reprint is the job.
You learn: proofing and error hunting under time pressure. What gets checked, in what order, and what is unrecoverable after the plant.
You turn in: a proof pass on somebody else’s finished spread with every error found and logged, and one written fix for the worst one.
Scored on: what you caught, and what you missed that I catch afterward. The last workshop of the year is the one closest to the actual job.
Every deliverable above is real work the book needs anyway. Nobody is shooting a test roll into a drawer. W2 is an event that has to be uploaded regardless, W3 is a game that has to be covered, W5 is a spread that has to be filled. The grade is for doing your job in a way somebody can check.
Before you leave the room, set the camera to RAW and confirm the card is writing .ARW, .NEF or .CR2. The menu paths for every body are on the main page under The Pipeline.
The lens list. Everything actually in the cabinet, with which one to grab for which situation: the gym, the stage, a portrait, a wide classroom, a detail. Being inventoried now.
Example galleries for each recipe, shot on our own gear in our own gym, so you can see what the settings on this page actually produce.