Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

As a teaching artist, I am excited about the new school year. I am scheduling traditional author visits, but I am also scheduling a few longer residencies. Tuesday, I will join other Jackson-area artists and arts organizations in meeting with elementary school faculty and principals committed to integrating the arts into everyday academic instruction. This group is the Ask for More Arts Collaborative, a program of Parents for Public Schools of Jackson. I will offer my services through the AFMA JumpstART program.

In collaboration with teachers and a librarian friend, I have designed two projects that combine writing and photography. They are: The Fibonacci Folding Book Project and [Your School] on the Map. Regular blog readers will have followed the development of these projects. Julie Owen, librarian at St. Therese Catholic School, helped develop the Fibonacci Folding Book Project. It is a companion to Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature.

Second grade teachers at Davis Magnet School, most notably Beth West, helped develop Davis on the Map, or [Your School] on the Map. You may click on the “Davis on the Map” category to the right to read about this project. Both of these projects feature the study of the work of a master artist, the opportunity for students to create original artwork, and an exploration of the program’s theme (Community: A Sense of Place.) Each meets curriculum objectives in the visual arts and several academic areas.

I have taken first day of school pictures for a decade now. Wow!

Here are two of the three boys in their traditional first day of school picture. They were not willing to smile for me. I asked Richard to pose with them because their older brother was upstairs in the shower when they had to take their leave. Richard says he’ll photoshop G into the image later. We’ll see.

Now for the real one.

Richard and I went to Oregon with the boys. We visited some friends in Bend and spent time in Portland and on the Coast. Here are some of the photographs we took. A few are panoramas knitted together using photoshop and a few are high dynamic range images.

I can already see that these panoramas are not suited well to the size constraints of a blog.

Most of our parsley has been trying to go to seed for the last month and I’ve just given up and let it go. We noticed a swallowtail butterfly on it a few days ago, and then we noticed lots of leafless stems. The caterpillars have arrived. We decided to get up early this morning to take photographs of the swallowtail caterpillars at different stages. First, I’ll show you the most recognizable.

Now, this is the smallest one we could find today.

Now, for the in between.

I also hunted for eggs, but didn’t find any. It looks like we were too late for this group. Maybe there will be another group. … Please. While we were looking, Richard spotted this guy.

I learned today that Joan Broerman, the founder of the Southern Breeze chapter of SCBWI, reviewed Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature on her Book Log blog. “Lavish photographs by both Campbells and easy to follow diagrams support the brief but clear text so even the most math resistant reader will be drawn in, totally unaware of how much he or she is learning,” Joan wrote. You can read the entire review here. Thank you, Joan.

We just returned from three carefree days on Pawleys Island, SC. We visited Uncle Jack and Aunt Kathy. Here are some photos.

Photographs from Old Scrapbooks

Many people are interested in how to make a photo collage using Lightroom. Just recently I had another question about it on an old post. I decided to make sure I remembered how to do it. I made this one, again based on this tutorial.

The recent question had to do with how to convert the collage (or multi-picture package, in Lightroom lingo) into a jpg. Here is how I did it:
1) With the photograph selected, I chose the Print menu from the choices on the top right menu bar (Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, Web).
2) Scroll down the right column until you find the Print Job menu.
3) Just under print job, you may choose “printer” or “jpg”. (Only one is visible at a time; they toggle back and forth).
4) After choosing jpg, the button on the very bottom right will read Print to File.
5) At that point, a dialogue box will appear and you will have to select the place where you would like to save the jpg file you’ve created.
Good luck.

Spring brings sunshine, flowers, recitals, and exhibits. On Friday, Richard and I will attend the Opening Reception for the JumpstART project. My participation in JumpstART this year was at McLeod Elementary School. I worked with 5th grade students to photograph and research living things in the Schoolyard. (Read previous posts here.) With generous support from the Beth Israel Congregation, an adopter of McLeod, we enlarged five photographs for display. The students compiled the rest of the photographs with titles and captions into the first McLeod Schoolyard Field Guide. See the photos in a gallery on my website.

In addition to the work with McLeod, I returned to Davis Magnet School for a second year of Davis on the Map. Instead of being paid through JumpstART, the Davis Magnet principal and second grade team found separate grant funding to pay for my time. (You can read about this project in these previous posts.) You can see some of the photographs I took below. I have the students’ photographs in galleries on my main website.

Visit the JumpstART exhibit at the Mississippi Art Center from Saturday, April 17, through Friday, April 30.

I spotted this bee hovering around my Indian Hawthorne bushes. I was using our Nikon D200 with a Sigma telephoto lens. Richard was equipped with the D700 and Tamron macro lens. We had spent a few hours in a field outside Clinton searching for milkweed and monarch eggs. We had no luck on the monarch eggs, but we had a fun time taking photographs anyway.

This next one is for no reason other than I looked through the lens and I liked the lines and the contrasting dried weeds against the green.

Growing Patterns Update
We found out yesterday that Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature is going into a second printing. My editor got in touch because he wanted me to see the new text for the back cover. It will now include excerpts from reviews. We’ve had a few new reviews in the last few days. In the April issue of School Library Journal, Jody Kopple writes: “This slim, attractive volume makes clear the appearance and significance of Fibonacci numbers in nature, both through simple, precise explanations and eye-catching photographs.” Read the whole review here (You’ll have to scroll down to nonfiction).

In the May/June issue of Horn Book Magazine, Tanya D. Auger, writes: “With its glossy, clutter-free pages; crisp, colorful photographs; and clear, straight-to-the-point text, this interactive picture book by the creators of Wolfsnail is an attractive, satisfying introduction to the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 …” The entire review is not available online.

I am feeling the strong pull of beautiful spring weather. It’s all I can do not to grab the camera and wander the neighborhood snapping all the beautiful flowers or catch a nap on the back porch. Has spring arrived where you are?

I spent an hour this morning taking photographs on St. Therese’s school grounds with third graders. We had 13 students with 5 cameras to share and two adults with a camera each. The kids ran for the grassy area with wildflowers. One of the students said: “I found a 4.” It took me a minute to realize that she meant a flower with four petals. Another said: “I found a five!” I had read Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature the previous day.

We were very excited to find this spiderwort, which is featured in Growing Patterns. It was this time last year that I was taking the final photographs for the book.