Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

I spent two days this week at Davis, guiding fourth graders as they chose photographs for their field guides. It is always fun to spend time looking through photographs, and these students took some interesting ones. You can see some of their images in previous posts here and here.

We had a few challenges as we worked through this process. First of all, we had a hard time making the 1,490 images accessible to students at school. There is a computer lab at school and there are a few laptops. We did not have/nor could we get permission (central office IT department permission) to save the images to the computer network. There was only enough hard drive space available in the computer lab to save one teacher’s groups’ photos to the hard drive of one computer. What ended up working was saving all the images to four separate jump drives, attaching each one to a computer in the lab, and accessing the images via the usb port.

I worked with each group for about 30 minutes. For the first three sessions each day, I had the help of the classroom teacher. Thank you, Mr. Gunther, Ms. Cross, Ms. West, and the other helpers who taught the rest of the students in the classroom.

Selection worked like this:

• Each student wrote his/her name and group number on an index card.
• Each student chose his/her top three photographs. Each student noted the photograph’s file number and a brief description.
• Then, each student shared with the group the descriptions of his/her top three photos. When there was overlap in photo subjects, I asked each student to pull up his/her image. Then, we talked about which image we preferred and why and took an informal vote. Generally, reaching consensus was pretty easy.
• It helped to remind the students that we wanted each page in the guide to have unique content, and it helped to remind them of the topic of their particular field guide. (In one instance, a student really liked her photo of a worm, but the group decided that her photo of a fly better fit the topic, which was insects.)
• As final selections were made, the student circled the image file number and short description on the index card.
• We printed each image on regular copy paper (by sending a print job to the school’s main copy machine in the office) for reference.
• At home in the afternoon, I uploaded the selected images to a local photo store, and ordered 4 x 6 inch prints.

I made a sample field guide this week using some photographs of mine. It helped today to have the model with me so students could visualize what their field guides will look like.

At this point, my involvement with this project will shift gears. I have completed my contact sessions with students. Next week, students will make watercolors with Carol Cox Peaster and Elizabeth Williams of the Mississippi Museum of Art. They will also continue their research, and begin to write the text that will accompany each photograph.

This is my 500th blog post, a milestone I could hardly have imagined back in August 2007 when I launched this blog. Given my twin passions for teaching and photography, it is fitting that today’s post should showcase photographs by fourth graders I’ve been teaching. These images were all taken at the Mississippi Museum of Art in the Art Garden, using Kodak Easy Share cameras. If you want to see a photo displayed larger, just click on it.

If you want to read more about this project, check out this blog post by Elizabeth Williams, curator of education at the museum. Her post features photographs of students.

I spent the last two mornings at the Mississippi Museum of Art with Davis Magnet School fourth graders. On the first day, it was overcast and threatened (then, delivered) rain. Today it was cold, but very sunny. Two very different photography challenges. Each group, ranging from three students to six students, went out with an adult leader to captures images for a field guide. The categories ranged from flowers to sculpture to textures to non-plant living things. Students took as few as six photographs and as many as 68. We were working with 12 cameras owned by the museum and two of mine.

I had a fairly elaborate backup system set up to transfer images from the cameras’ memory cards to my Epson photo viewer and my laptop. During the times when students did not have cameras, they worked on sketching. Each had a clipboard with some blank journal pages and a pencil. We also had plenty of field guides and other reference books available for onsite research.

Here are some of the shots that jumped out at me on first glance. I don’t know which ones the students will select next week because it will depend on what makes sense for their field guides. I thought you would like a preview.

If you’ve made it this far, you know that many of the students were intent on documenting the plant life in the garden. The students who chose insects had a tough assignment.

Now, for the rest of the team. (This was a boys tournament so no photos of the girls, this time.)

With all the photographs we’ve taken of Murrah High School’s boys soccer team, we didn’t have any good ones of the keeper in action. We set out to remedy that during the Pearl Invitational Tournament last weekend. Our intrepid keeper, Stephen S., saved many a goal during our three losses. Here are a few examples. (Click on the photo to see a larger view.)

I went out on a nature journaling expedition with Davis Magnet School fourth graders yesterday. Several kids in each class noticed this. One sketched it. Another called me over. We wondered what on earth it was.

Another fourth grader noticed this one.

We were in the Mississippi Museum of Art‘s Art Garden, gathering information for our series of Davis Field Guides to the Art Garden. The students had clipboards, “instant book” journals (see my post), and pencils.

Next week, the fourth graders will be back in the garden with clipboards, journals, pencils, cameras, and a set of published field guides for reference (we’re using Kaufman field guides to birds, insects, butterflies, and an Alabama and Mississippi Gardener’s Guide co-authored by Felder Rushing).

After Wednesday’s session, I went over to Eudora Welty Library and checked out two visual field guides to mushrooms, which I sent to Davis this morning with one of my neighbors who teaches there. So, I know what is in the two photographs above, but I am counting on the fourth graders to find out for themselves.

In addition to journaling with me in the garden, the fourth graders had a guided tour of the Mississippi Story with Elizabeth Williams, curator of education, and a drawing lesson with Carol Cox Peaster, the art garden coordinator. Specifically, Williams talked with students about Bill Dunlap’s Flat Out Dog Trot and Carol Cole’s Jackson, MS as examples of landscapes and cityscapes.

Here are some of Williams’s comments: “It was interesting to see how the students who had been outside and had already used their journal, got out their sketchbooks and began writing everything they saw in the works of art. They were very perceptive and each group noticed very different things about each of the painting. Lastly, we took a look at the four Walter Anderson’s on the walls and tried to develop a pool of words that could be used to describe Anderson’s style. Some students interpreted his word as “bright” “energetic” and “creative”, while others noticed some of the cooler colors he used that might be interpreted as sad or gloomy. All of the students noted that the work was not very realistic.”
Here is Peaster teaching the drawing class.

Ivy Alley, curator of education, docents and volunteers at the museum, led a tour of the art in the Art Garden.

During our last sesion at the museum, the fourth graders brainstormed about the topics they might choose for their Davis Field Guides to the Art Garden.

Thank you, Beth West, Davis’ IB Coordinator, and Kacy Hellings, Davis’ Librarian, and Julian Rankin, the museum’s public relations coordinator for taking photographs. You can see Rankin’s Facebook album of images here.

Thank you, fourth grade teachers, Jalesha Cross and Jordan Gunther, for guiding students; and two parents who came along as chaperones. We are grateful for the help.

I’ve spent hours today going through my photo files. I am deleting duplicates. There was a time not too long ago when the first thing I did after transferring my photographs from the camera card to my computer was batch processing in Adobe Photoshop to create a photoshop document for each image. That means I have hundreds of .psd files that duplicate .nef files. Sometimes, I batch processed a whole set of .jpgs at the same time. More needless duplication.

I am also finding photographs in my main Chronological Photos file that belong in other files, such as the Photos By Others file. I just moved three sets of photographs that I was given by another parent when we did the Faces of Chastain quilt project in 2007. Today I still remember that they were taken by Susan, but who knows how long I would have remembered. It is so much easier to go through hundreds, nay thousands, of photographs in digital form than as prints, or negatives. I know this from the organizational project I am helping my mother with.

I am learning more about how to use Adobe Lightroom’s organizational tools, including search functions and collections. The fun part of doing this is I am seeing lots and lots of photographs. I took these two photographs in October and November 2011. (They aren’t my kids and they’ve grown up a lot since then.)

Here’s my favorite of the photographs we took while we were doing video. This is a garden snail I found under the leaf litter in my butterfly garden. It was just after cold weather had zapped my busy lizzies (impatiens) and the snails were all tucked in around the slimy stems.

Today I want to take video of a wolfsnail settled into a cool spot (on a brick). I filled a plastic container with bricks and I am hoping it will find a cool brick the best surface to settle onto. We’ll see.

You can see from the above photograph that I have decided I should be watermarking the photographs I post on the blog. Adobe Lightroom makes it very easy to watermark photographs during the Export process. One of my goals this coming year is to take more advantage of the organizational tools in Lightroom. As you might imagine from the number of photographs I share on the blog, we take and store a ton of photographs. We need to do a better job of clearing off the ones we’ll never use. I am going back through about 6 years worth of images stored on my external hard drive array and deleting anything that is clearly unusable (out of focus, awful exposure, etc.) As I do this, I am tagging the photographs with names, events, etc. Ultimately I hope it will make it easier to find photographs.

I’m planning to share some of the photographs I uncover as I go through.

Posts always slow around Christmastime because we are working on things we cannot post. Richard and I scanned and restored these photos and put them together in a panel for my sister, Emilye, to recall her days of Little League baseball when she was “the best backcatcher in the state of Mississippi.”

You can see last year’s photo panels here and here. Unfortunately, the USPS, which I was praising to high heaven earlier this holiday season, managed to lose the tube in which this photo panel was sent. I am re-ordering from Deville Camera today and it will go out, again, soon.

Here’s our Christmas Eve table at Mom and Dad’s. I made the tablecloth for Mom for Christmas. It has two sides: one for Christmas and one for the rest of the year’s parties.

And, for tools, Richard got an LED light shaped like a ring that mounts onto our Tamron 90 mm lens. We’ve embarked on our project to create an app for Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator.

Some quick snaps from the sidelines that do a good job of capturing these people. I think, anyway.

Douglas

Susan

Richard