I spent the last few mornings coaching some students from a neighbourhood school on the basics of photography. Previously, I had taught Primary and Junior College students, but this was my first time teaching Secondary students. It was an interesting experience for me and I had to constantly try to adapt my material on the go based on their attention span (short!) as well as interest level. It was a challenging experience to say the least! Based on what I gathered from this past workshop, the next time I do it for this level, it would probably be a quite different approach from how I did it this time round.
The following are a couple of photos that I took on the last day’s practical session in the school. The first 3 were used as composition examples, with the curved bench as the main strong graphical form that draws the viewer’s eyes across the image. They were also used to show how choosing a different viewpoint of the same subject (i.e. the curve bench), changes the dynamics of the forms in the image. The images of the lizard also showed how a different viewpoint changes the look of an image. The third, fifth and sixth images were used to illustrate aperture’s effect on depth of field. The forth image (girls running), was used to illustrate freezing motion using an appropriate shutter speed. The last one was used to illustrate how the juxtaposition of things (e.g. the sign and the person) can make an image more interesting. All of them were also used to illustrate how the post processing of an image affects the final “look and mood” of the image. The students seemed to have had the most fun playing around with Lightroom 3.0 during the post processing session.
