Digital photography is a diverse medium that can produce a
wide array of outcomes. With the rise of smart phones, digital photography has
become a frequent, possibly daily, activity for most children. Whether they are Snapchatting, taking images of the world around them or taking a selfie they are constantly capturing
digital imagery. Using a phone to take a picture is pretty different from using
a DSLR camera as they have much more for settings you can adjust. This is
something I learned when I got my first DSLR camera as a teenager and spent
hours trying to figure out what the P, A, S and M stood for on my camera. I
went to a camp where I studied digital photography and had my first experiences
with using a camera, shooting in a studio using lighting equipment, as well as,
photo editing on Photoshop. I learned (the basics of) a variety of ways to
manipulate an image in a realistic or imaginative manner. This is something I
never had the opportunity to learn about other than while at camp. Even as a
Studio Art major in college, digital photography wasn’t offered as a course.
The only time photography was discussed was to find imagery as sources for another
medium or to document artworks in progress, and finished; never as the medium
itself. I think digital photography as its own medium has a lot to offer. As a
teacher I would like to teach children about digital photography as a medium in
its own right and explore the ways in which we can create with it.
1. I think it is important to expose children to different
artistic mediums so that they can find what sparks their interest and further
explore it. This assignment would be best suited for older children because
understanding digital photography requires a good amount of patience. In a 9th-12th
grade class I would like to teach students the basics of digital photography;
things like, aperture, shutter speed and F-stop. We would discuss how lighting
and framing plays a part in the outcome of an image. Students would then take a
series of images, playing around with these settings to see what sort of
emotions the different images evoke and how they do so. For example, blurring
something out to emphasize something else, a very dark versus a very bright
image, and so on. How do these settings change our perception of what we’re
seeing?
2. Photography offers us a way to capture elements of the
world we find aesthetically pleasing. It also gives us a way to see the world in a new perspective. Singling out colors in the world is
something I always found interesting. This assignment would be about looking
for color in the objects around us. Using a camera to frame the composition, students
would single out a color that caught their eye, whether it is a bright orange
traffic cone on a dull grey paved street or a strip of paint on the wall.
Looking for this contrast of colors is a way to practice slowing down the eye
to really look at the world around us. This project would be best suiting for
middle school aged students.
3. Photography doesn’t always have to be realistic. Through
editing, photographs can be manipulated into entirely new creations. This
assignment would ask students to take a photo of a landscape and somehow alter
it so that it is unrealistic. Whether they add in digital drawings, change the
colors of the landscape, or distort the perspective, the outcome would take on
a totally new meaning from the original. This assignment would best be done
with 8th-10th grade students who can experiment with
Photoshop settings as well as digital painting on top of an existing image to manipulate/alter
it. This would expose students to the possibilities of digital photography that
don’t always result in realistic outcomes but rather more imaginative ones.
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