Digital Photography is a wonderful thing. I can remember taking tons of photographs using a 35mm camera and wasting (self-perceived) rolls of film because I did not like the final results. I would occasionally find a “nugget” worthy of keeping, but as a novice photographer, it was far and few between. The older I got, the better I was at using my camera’s aperture settings and I started taking better shots. Then I bought a self-focusing, do-it-all camera and the fun began. About 5 years ago, I moved up in to the 21st century when my wife took pity on me and purchased a Kodak Digital camera for me to use. Now, all of a sudden, memory chips and the delete option have helped inspire me to take so many pictures, that I needed an external hard drive to store them.
As I spoke of in Module 1, I do not know “how” I see a final composition; I just do. As I read the Module 2 assignment, I can mentally see some of my pictures and the Observation portion start to take me back to the day I took the photographs. I chose one of my Lighthouse pictures to associate with. The photo helps remind me how I Visualized the scene on this particular day. I can Hear the water as it hits the shore. The seagulls that were flying behind me were loud. I can Feel the moist air and the water as I walked along the beach and the grass underneath my feet. It was not a cold day, but the gray sky prevented it from getting too hot at the same time. The Smell of Lake Huron and the heavy sky were also brought back to memory.
In my image of the lighthouse, the composition was all dictated by the time we showed up at the site. You can see by the lack of shadows underneath the picnic table that it was just before noon. The gray sky led to a hazy, soft focus. The timing was not picturesque, but it was unique. I used two trees, in the foreground, to form a frame around the lighthouse and I also made sure that there were no other people in my picture. All of this helped determine the final composition for this piece of artwork.
Now, how do I use all of this information in an elementary art class? If I give a digital photography lesson, I would have to explain a lot more than just the “point & shoot” mentality of most photographers. We would have to have pre-lessons, using a viewfinder to “see” what our compositions would end up looking like. The age group would dictate having to use the automatic settings (at first), but today’s cameras are real good at doing most of the work for us. We could talk about how to Observe our compositions, using the guidelines set out in chapter three of “Sparks of Genius.” It would be up to the student to try and accomplish a photograph that a viewer would be able to see, hear, touch, smell or taste what the photographer experienced the day the photo was taken.
Last, I have a question; to myself or open for suggestion: How do I teach digital photography alteration to elementary students? Photoshop, or a free, online alternative, paint.com, offer multiple ways to manipulate a photograph. We could spend weeks on the whole project, from taking the picture, to cropping a composition and final processing. There are so many ways to modify a picture that we could not talk about them all. It would all boil down to practice and experimentation. The more each student plays with a digital camera, the better they will become in taking quality shots. The same is true for processing programs. The more you play around with them, the better you get and the more you will know about them. In the end, it is all about how well the photographer observed their subject on the day they took the picture.
