The Lesson
Setting the Stage
Web Mastering classes will learn how to create digital photo essays using digital cameras and html. The class members use their personal experiences to plan and create moving essays about their lives as young adults.
Digital Photo Essays Lesson
Students were allowed to borrow cameras and create photographs of subjects that interested them. This lesson requires bringing together text and photographs on a single theme.
Goals
- To give students hands-on experience using digital cameras, including taking and downloading pictures and cropping and importing those pictures into fireworks and presenting them in html format.
- To develop students' understanding of the narrative structure in a story told using pictures. Students are to focus their pictures on a single theme and develop that theme through their images and words.
- To develop an understanding of the elements of photographic composition that help make a photograph powerful and effective for the viewer. Your subject matter is yours to choose.
- Lastly, to develop your own voice, in relationship to an audience of their peers.
Student Goals
- Use a digital camera to capture photos for use in a digital photo essay.
- Plan and develop a theme for the photo essay.
- Use the elements of photo composition taught in class to make photos that convey the message.
- Share the photo essays in class and accept peer comments.
Digital Photography Tutorial: Photographic Techniques
- Uncluttered
- The rule of thirds
- Frame your view
- Get close to the subject
- Look for strong lines and shapes
- The photo essay as a form of storytelling
Digital Photo Essay
W. Eugene Smith, Life magazine photographer and photoessayist, said, "The essay is relationships between photos. One must develop an awareness of the relationships, instead of just taking pictures. A person can go out and take pictures forever, and still never be able to unite, or bring together, these photos into a single theme, unless they have thought about the entire story or essay. The photos must be related -- one photograph says something about the subject; the next may amplify on that subject, or may add its own dimension to the subject."
TAKING PHOTOS FOR YOUR PHOTOESSAY
- Your photo essay should include at least ten photographs.
- Text and photographs should work together to tell the story.
- Photographs should include at least one picture that frames the view, and others that follow the rule of thirds.
- Photos and text should be balanced.
- You are free to change your focus as your ideas develop with the photos you take.
- Have at least one macro image included.
Possible Subjects:
- A day in my life: Use the camera to record the episodes of your day.
- Neighborhood Tour: What are the high and low points of your neighborhood?
- Your favorite spot: The Beach? The mall? School? Capture the place you love the best.
- Big Themes: Friendship, family, loyalty, anger. Can you capture an emotion with your camera?
- Career Exploration: Visit a workplace and photograph people doing different jobs. Interview them about what is good and bad about their jobs, and how they prepared to get them.
- Events: Take your camera to an event a concert, fashion show, trip to Kemah. Document the event and describe in words and photos what happened. Look for the drama!
- Illustrate a poem or song.
Your final project will include 11 web pages. (One title page and 10 pages with an image and caption.)