Photography 101

This week has been PINs week - this is where the students have a chance to sign up for a range of different activities with different teachers.  It's always an event that creates a huge amount of excitement in our kids.  PINs stands for Passions, Interests and Needs.  It is run for our year 1/2, year 3/4 and year 5/6 groups.  Lots of people get involved from learning assistants to DP's and Principals.  It's a fantastic event that always draws in a range of exciting activities and opportunities for the students.

Previously I've been running sessions around teaching gaming to students through Scratch.  But this time I decided to go to one of my other passions and ran a photography 101 session.  It was SUCH a great time.

We started in the class with a keynote presentation (see below) of a whole bunch of photos that I had taken that demonstrated basic elements of photography.  Concepts like viewpoints, considering your background, framing and the rule of thirds were all discussed while students had a chance to see examples of each one.  From here we talked a lot in pairs - recapping main ideas and deciding which concept we were going to experiment with next.

Next we spent 40 minutes exploring our playground.  We were on our stomachs, backs, climbing, jumping, underneath and above things all in the name of taking that interesting photo.  Students tried the same subject but from different angles and using different elements or trialling different focal lock points.

It was fantastic to hear kids using terms like focal lock, rule of thirds and reflecting on why their photo was great or not so great - then running off to make a change.

Finally, we came back to the class and hooked iPads and iPods up to the Apple TV through airplay and spent some time sharing photos.  I wish we had a lot more time to do this part of the session, as the room was buzzing and the students were keen to share their favourite photos.  This is definitely something to factor in for the next session.

Below is the presentation I created and used with the students prior to taking photos to show each of the concepts we were working on today.  It was a great way for them to see the difference these elements can make to their photographs.  I also created a sheet for students to use as a reference guide when taking photos and as a take away sheet of what was happening.  You can also access that sheet here - feel free to download and use in your class.
Both the presentation and the sheet are available under a Creative Commons licence - please no commercial use, attribute the work back to me and if you make modifications please attribute back to the original piece of work.  Click here for more information about this licence.

Enjoy!

Photography 101 from heymilly

Photography 101 by Amanda Signal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.