A student with faculty members Dan and Amy.
Man, our translators got a workout today and there were plenty of hiccups for all of us! The first started several days ago when we discovered that we were not going to be able to get the cameras we had brought from the US through customs. We tried and tried to negotiate the release of our equipment– we had even already prepared US repatriation papers from customs– but to no avail. For a while, we were afraid that we were going to have to teach 20 kids how to take photographs…without cameras. However, Sarah immediately got to work finding equipment from local photographers through her contacts in the Associated Press, and thankfully we were able to gather up enough cameras to continue with the workshop, as long as each of the students shared the equipment. And so far, it’s going great.
The students learned a TON today. When we asked at the beginning of the workshop if any of them had any experience with photography, we found that most of them had taken pictures before, but primarily with point-and-shoot cameras. By the end of the day, they had learned about and understood how to use ISO, aperture and shutter speeds on manual mode on our DSLRs, with manual focus. The most exciting part of it all was to see the students working together to help each other understand the concepts, and throughout the day they all kept getting better and better! This week is going to be an exciting one.
A note about our schedule.
Our hotel is pretty far away from the center where we’re holding the workshop. We drove for just over 4 hours from Managua to our hotel and covered a grand total of 164 km…roughly 100 miles. Our locations are going to be an additional 45 -90 minutes further up into the mountains. So this workshop has been organized to include two long classroom days so that the students can master techniques of photography down, and then we’ll have three days of intense shooting on location. We’re planning to cover a grand total of nine different locations and programs split between two groups, which will require 3+ hours of driving! Our students are going to have a ton of experience by Friday!