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On Wednesday I started a new venture for me. I am teaching 10 3rd-5th graders all I know about digital photography. In 8 weeks. (Sometimes I wonder if I know enough to fill that time!) I am doing this as a part of the curriculum for GROW. A program at our church for kindergarten through 5th graders. It stands for Growing Relationships on Wednesday. The kids all arrive to singing and fun at 5:00, they have a fun family style dinner with all their friends, have bible study time and then they break into small groups for ‘recreation time’. At the beginning of the semester the kids pick their electives including yoga, drama, crazy science, dinosaurs, scrapbooking, big games and digital photography. That’s where I come in just in case you weren’t following along!
So I will be using my iPad to show the kids slides and pictures that illustrate my lessons. I’ve also promised to post the lesson here for any kids who missed the class. So this is where you come in. Feel free to join us in learning the basics of photography. For the next 8 Fridays I’ll post the lesson and maybe you can play along at home.
I’ll spare you the part where I introduce myself. I will tell you, though, that I am super lucky to have Karly Lee assisting me in this venture. Karly is a fantastic photographer and actually much better at the technical stuff than me. She’ll keep me on the straight and narrow!
After the boring introductions I talked to the kids about the different kinds of cameras they might have. Here are some examples.
Point and shoot cameras often don’t have a view finder, but when they do just note that the view finder shows an approximation of what the lens will see. It doesn’t to truly show what the picture will be. (This is especially true for close up shots!)
This is the kind of camera that Karly and I shoot with primarily. These cameras allow the greatest amount of creative flexibility.
The best camera you have is the one you have with you! (That is not an original quote, I just don’t know who to attribute it to.) I take MANY of my family photos with my iPhone because that is what I have with me. It takes great pictures and there are some fun apps that add filters to give the images a neat finish. (Like Hipstamatic!) In fact, you can take such great pictures that there was a whole book published by photographer Chase Jarvis with images taken solely on his iPhone. What a challenge!
So how is this going to work for the kids? (I am showing all the slides I make for the kids so some of this won’t apply to you Internet!)
And finally we get to the lesson portion of the evening. One of the best ways to get better at taking pictures is to take a lot of shots and to experiment. Look for different angles or try shooting from the perspective of your subject.
Here are some examples of experimenting I’ve done lately. Shoot standing above your subject looking down…
Shoot your subject straight on. This is how my dog looks at me in the morning so I shot this with the camera almost sitting right on the bed!
Shoot a close up shot of some of your favorite things…
Shoot straight down the side of your subject…
Shoot your subject looking straight up at it…
Shoot your subjects from behind…
What else can YOU think of? Stay tuned next week when we tackle exposure!