What I've Been Busy With...

I have been very busy these last two weeks with the quarter ending, graduate school, working on Kate's secret birthday present, and also an after-school program. I'd like to tell you about my photography adventure with 35 middle school students.

I taught a photography class during these last three weeks and it was very interesting! Let me repeat, 35 students who, keep in mind, are middle schoolers. I had another teacher every other day, otherwise they normally keep the ratio to 1:15. When I asked the students what brought them to this class they said, "I like to take pictures of myself."

Wonderful.
It was very difficult to get them to understand what photography really is and that it's not "snap shots" of themselves.

We didn't have cameras so we used our iPads. They worked very well but they have a great capability for "continuous" shooting mode. Holy millions of photos. After we collected our photos they chose one to edit. They used a great free program called "PS Express" which is from Photoshop. You could do many things in terms of editing. Then we opened up another free program called, "PerfectPhoto" so we could use the black and white filter and then invert it to create a negative.

They coolest thing I learned while teaching this was a way to print from the iPad that is really easy. (You can also print from your iPhone too!) I honestly have no idea how to set it up--this is something I will be asking my media specialist at school about.

(Articles on AirPrint or FingerPrint)
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4356?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/airprint.html

Anyway, you just press the print button on your iPad (or iPhone) and it will wirelessly send it to the desktop connected to the printer and out your page will come. It's magic! We printed our inverted black and white photos (negatives) on transparencies. They next day we created "cyanotype" prints for the kids to take home.

It was a very cool project because it was "old meets new." We had our digital prints and put them through a darkroom process. Here's some photos from the process: