Day 163 Bad Day - For my egg.
On day one of our elementary school photography class we discussed the rule of thirds and the kids homework assignment was to shoot a picture using the rule of thirds. Some kids really did quite well at it. Today, I sent the kids out onto the playground with their egg and camera. Instruction, shoot a picture of your egg and you have ten minutes. Don't care what you do with your egg so long as you are not harming the school property and clean up any mess you make. They kind of looked around a little befuddled and each student eventually set their egg down somewhere and took a picture of the egg looking down on it. The class was done with this exercise in less than five minutes and we were all back in the classroom. I had each student bring their picture up and we all agreed we had a bunch of plain old uninteresting egg pictures. From here I explained about trying to show a subject in a different way. I had all of the students look around the computer room we were in and take a mental note of how it looked. Then we all laid on the floor on our chests looking up and discussed how different the room looked by changing our perspective. The kids discussed how they saw all the chrome legs of the chairs, cables from the computer, and how much bigger the room looked from the floor up. We then discussed how the room might look if we were really high above the room. The light bulb in their heads started to glow. Next I threw my pictures up in front of the class and explained that I too only had ten minutes and accomplished all four of my photos.
1. An egg with a drawn face running for it's life from a tire about to roll over it.
2. An egg laying in the flat of eggs with the writing, "NO Vacancy" written on the outside of the egg.
3. A cracked and split egg with the contents oozing out.
4. An egg with its guts spilled out as it looks down upon its spilled guts.
The light bulb really started to glow bright in their heads. I reminded them of the first instruction, do what you want. Just don't vandalize and clean up your mess. I explained the problem is we all get trained to do certain things and we don't step out of the box. I further explained, that as young photographers they need to step out of the box and look at things differently so they may capture what others miss.
With the kids mental light bulbs glowing brightly they excitedly headed out wanting another crack (pun intended) at this exercise. They used their full ten minutes and came back in really excited about what they had accomplished.
All-in-all I can say I have started a number of young people photographers (on day one I explained they are now photographers learning a skill and no longer picture takers) on the road to one day being adult photographers. This is really turning into something exciting for the kids now that they are, second pun intended as well, seeing the light!

Ah, I crack myself up!

Oops, I did it again... WAIT! STOP! Now I'm starting to sound like a Britney Spears song. No more puns, they've just become dangerous when Britney Spears lyrics start creeping in.