Portraits!

In a world of the selfie, one would think students would be good to go with the whole take a picture of a person thing... Well thats where you would be wrong. It has proven very difficult to get good pictures from a large portion of my students and here is why.

In this article we will be talking about what I wished I had really drove home to may student before they went out to take pictures.

Here we go:
1. Don't use the flash. (The flash is not your friend. make sure they know how to control the camera enough to be able to figure out how to never have a flash happen)

2. Stay in Focus (I see blurry photos all the time, every time I give a photography project I get at least 5 kids who turn in photos that look like they were trying to capture images of Big foot. Remind them a blur photo is the equivalent of turning in a an art project that has been scribbled over)

3. The Candid is overrated (Students see the pictures on Pinterest of all these lovely wedding candids that are adorable, but they are also super hard to do correctly. So instead of getting great Candids, all you end up getting is a bunch of blurry out of focus pictures of kids with their faces in distorted positions)

4.  Have a nice long lesson about posing. (Teach them how to direct a model, and set up an photo area. Also have a participation project where they go out and try those skills, with only the goals being posing. Then bring them back together to critique what they did.)

5.  Loading pictures. This seems like an easy one. When students bring back the cameras make sure they load them on their computer right away, don't let them wait to do it. (If I had a dollar for every time a student told me they lost their photos because they weren't on the camera anymore, I would have a whole heck of a lot of Dollars)