A bus load of new faces and a room full of new stories. These new students come from all different backgrounds and experience levels. Some of the students have used cameras before, but the majority haven’t. Very excited to start the week and get to know these new kids!

At the start of each week, we typically have an afternoon tech session for the students…an intro and then we truly begin the week on the following day. However, we wanted to focus a little bit more on team building so we decided to change things up this week as well. We instead began things this morning with an earlier 10am session where the students met us for a few games and a introductory discussion facilitated by Marco, one of the AKF staff. The main goal of this mornings session was to give the students a chance to really introduce themselves and share their goals and motivation for this session. It was a new experience for us and was absolutely eye opening!!!…it will probably become standard after this week.

So the morning was spent getting to know the kids and in the afternoon we jumped right into the tech session. Originally, this half-day session, was always optional in our previous workshops. However, after the first couple of locations, more and more of the kids started showing up and now it’s the new start of every workshop. This session is dedicated to going over the workflow (shooting, downloading, importing, and editing) and getting familiar with the cameras. It’s probably the most dense 3 hours of the workshop but it has to be done and the kids handled it was grace. We wrapped up early and headed back to the hotel for dinner and an early nights sleep…because we’re going to need it!

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