Analogue Inventory

In addition to being a functional art display, the wall in my bedroom helps me track how many silly toy cameras my collection has grown to.
I have also managed to amass more than 10 rolls of film. I once again have access to the COS darkroom for spring, so expect updates soon.
Excuse me while I check my ebay watch list and try to take apart a thrift store find...
Updates abound soon
Kelly

How to take photos in the snow - Q&A with a student

One of my photography students wanted to know more about taking photos in the snow, so here is a Q&A with Hannah about photography in the snow.

Q: Do I use flash when I take snow photos?
A: Try not to, especially when the snow is still falling.  The flash will typically make your camera and flash focus on the snowflakes, not the background.  Here’s an example of why this doesn’t work:

Q: How do you keep your camera dry?
A: Take pictures from under an umbrella or out of your car window or under the eaves of your house.

Q: What are good things to take pictures of?
A: Portraits are perfect for snow.  Snow reflects light and creates a great lighting situation for taking pictures of people.  They're faces are well lit from above, below and all around.  Landscapes are always good, but remember, the heavier it is snowing, the more that snow will obscure your photo - making it a little blurry (even without flash).

Good Luck!

Kelly

Teaching Photography

Today I started my photography and digital imaging class at the school where I work.  I found this today on Facebook as well.  It seems fitting.  Enjoy.

Ten lessons the arts teach

January 12th, 2012 by Kim Hermanson, Ph.D.

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job. 
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

* Excerpted from Elliot Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, 2002, published by NAEA Publications.  

-Kelly

Rollei Redbird

I stumbled upon this film at Freestyle.  It’s wound into the film canister backwards, so you shoot photos through the anti-halogen coating layer.  Results: Even the bluest of skies turns red.  Great silhouettes too.

Get some!
Kelly