Residency- Venice Arts- Issa Sharpe- 6 Hours
Every week I love this class more and more. Seriously. I had to wake up a bit earlier than usual to gather props for the student to use in their shoots today. I also got there a little bit earlier to bring up my lesson plan. We had to quickly make some changes to add a camera review into the lesson plan for the day, so we didn't really get a chance to talk about my lesson until after.
We went over aperture and shutter speed yet again and had a quiz to help motivate the review. There was one student in particular who clearly was not understanding it, so when we passed the cameras out I tried helping her one on one. It turned out that she didn't understand shutter speed because she didn't know fractions! I can imagine this stuff just sounded like a foreign language to her. After showing her some examples of how the camera would capture motion at different speeds, I switched her camera to Shutter-Speed priority and advised her to try it at a variety of speeds.
Shortly after, a student asked me to take a photo of my hat, and I went with her outside to shoot it. She understood the settings, so we worked on compositional elements. Then, the class broke off into shooting groups. Some went outside to explore nature, some went outside to find dogs, and the rest stayed inside to use props. I stayed inside, for I brought some props to use.
There were two girls interested in fashion, and I brought a duffle bag full of my most colorful and fun clothes for them to use. Angela, a lead, also brought some of her fashion accessories. They set up my clothes on a stand intended for a backdrop and dressed each other up for a fashion shoot. It was adorable. I also loved the fact that I share some of the same fashion interests as 10-year-old-girls (I just bought a kimono, and they loved it). Angela was the main one helping them, while I was inside with two students: Johnny and Holland.
Holland was shooting phones and is very independent. I didn't have to help her much but would pop by periodically to give her feedback and potentially ideas for new photos.
Johnny wanted to shoot outer-space, so we had to get creative. I asked him what exactly he was interested in about outer space. After a bit of pondering, he said, "I want to know if there's life on Mars". So we had to construct mars within the classroom. I scavenged up some materials from the facilities. We made a mixture of ground coffee, cayenne pepper, and various glitters to make a Mars-like atmosphere. We found a small discolored frog figurine to use as our aliens. The whole set up turned out pretty legit, in my biased opinion
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After class, I stayed to go over my lesson plan with Angela. She gave me some great feedback. I won't spoil it in my journal, for I'll be writing about it next week! :)