Watch out for falling mangos!
As if it wasn’t enough for our students to remember all the technical information Sarah and Wendy taught them today, they had to be aware of the random mangos that would drop from the heavily laden trees on campus where we practiced shooting this afternoon. The mangos were the least of our students’ worries as they concentrated on balancing their apertures and shutter speeds to make properly exposed pictures.
Let me back up. We teach our students how to use digital SLRs on manual mode which means they choose the camera settings to make pictures that look just like they envision. This is a big change from the automated cell phone photography many of our students are familiar with, and they are excited for the challenge of creating images manually rather than having the camera think for them. We teach our students that good pictures start from the brain and heart, and that before they start moving controls on the camera, they need to reflect on how they feel about their subject and what they want to say.
Today our writing students worked with Alex practicing their interviewing skills with Elizabeth about her photography career. They learned the value of asking follow-up questions before beginning their next topic about approaching subjects with empathy.
Photography students worked amidst the mangos on the beautiful Aga Khan campus, slowly at first, and then quicker as their fingers found controls in a more thoughtful, fluid manner. There was laughter, there was posing, and no one was reaching for their cell phones. I think they might be hooked!