What is Photography to You?

I had a class with Ansel Adams before he died in the 70's. He had a way of looking at the scenery around us and seeing how the light was painting a picture and then capturing it on film. I learned a lot about seeing things around me from him. I saw how he looked for contrast in either lighting or shape or texture. He was the best in the world at looking at the amount of light present and then adapting the film to capture all of it. He created a system of exposure called the Zone System where exposure was set to capture the minimal detail needed in a photo and then the film was processed to add the highlights. He put all of the detail needed into the area the film could see. You might say he compressed the information to fit the media.

Today I still think of things he said when I take a photo. He said to pre-visualize what your final photo will look like. I think of the final product hanging on the wall when I look around me and suddenly "feel" a photograph. Yes, feel is correct. When I am on vacation traveling to a new city I just have to take photographs. I feel them inside of me. I then need to take my camera and look at what my eyes see and compress that into the restrictions of the frame and the exposure capabilities of the media to share that feeling with someone else. The process of making the photo is as rewarding as anything you can do but the best part is when someone else enjoys the work and feels the same thing I did.

Composition is the most critical part of capturing that feeling. Exposure is the second part. The challenge of photography is to take the light that exists in your world and put it onto paper or into the computer. http://www.scphoto.com tells a lot about that and shares much of what I have learned after 40 years taking pictures. My own personal web gallery at http://homepage.mac.com/keithwills46/Menu4.html shares some of the experience I have had in the past two years. Please feel free to view them and share with me your thoughts about them or about what it is about photography that interests you.

Why is it important to change our teaching style?

With an increasing emphasis on standardized testing and an need to cover more and more content how can we meet this challenge and serve our students in the best possible way? We live in a society where information is EASY to find. The problem is that we have too much information and we need to know how to filter it for relevance and value to us. Our students use technology daily from their computer games, cell phones, DVD players, MP3 audio players to instant messaging and chat rooms. Kids find these tools vital to their communication.

When I was a teen I was an amateur radio operator (WA6TKC) and often stayed up late at night to make contact with other hams in other countries. There was a thrill in knowing that I had made contact with others and had a QSL Card or postcard to show it. My wall was full of hundreds of them. I loved it. But, it was all using Morse Code which was slow and our conversations were not very deep. I got a chance to help send important messages to Alaska in 1962 during the earthquake there. It made me feel important.

This same thrill is there for our students only it is much better than it was for me. With the internet they can actually share information with people all over the world. I taught photography for 28 years before moving into Technology Coordination for our school district. For years I tried to get my students to make a good critique of a photograph and got deep answers like " I like it" or It's cool". Then I put their photographs into a gallery where they had to compete in class to get only the best shot from the 120 students to show. Those in the gallery had people make comments about them. Kids were excited. I could hardly hold them down. Now they were telling me about the photographs center of interest and how the photographer used composition to make the photo exciting.

We can still expose kids to the same content and standards we used when I taught before but now we can add a technology component where they can share their work with people all over the world. The feed back they get will feed their desire for more. Now our problem will be keeping the from doing too much rather than trying to keep them awake.