My blog posts lately seem to be somewhat on the negative side lately… I thought I might lighten the mood a bit by describing some sparks of hope in that first semester that helped me remember the reason why I went into teaching in the first place.

Best Day of the First Semester of Teaching:

I remember a day just before Thanksgiving. Volleyball had just finished up (Did I mention that I also coached volleyball that first year? Busy busy!), so I had a moment to breathe before the end of semester. 

I have spoken about my graphic design and digital photography classes in previous posts, in this post I want to give you a full picture of what the rest of classes looked like in those first few weeks (because I taught MANY classes).

In my last post, I talked about my experience with graphic design in that first month of school. In this post, I will talk about how my digital photography class threw me for a loop.

Luckily, I actually did know how to take a quality picture, I had grown up doing photography for 4-H and knew a couple things about composition at least. However, I quickly learned that knowing how to take pictures didn’t mean that I knew the best way to teach someone to take pictures!

I already briefly went over my first day of school, but I wanted to talk about the first month or so some of the specific classes that I taught. I already briefly went over my first day of school, but I wanted to come back to it again and discuss some of the specific classes. Looking back on this has really shown me how much I have grown and learned in the past 7 years. It has really been an enlightening experience for me.

With nearly every class I taught, I would play the "what if" game.

As I entered the summer before my first year teaching, I was excited and I thought that I was prepared. My schedule was full; I would be teaching graphic design 1 and 2, digital photography, Art 1, 2, and 3, and yearbook. Writing it all out like that sounds overwhelming, but by the end of the summer, I had done some research and made some plans for the first month or two of class and I felt relatively confident.

I want to back up a little this semester and talk a bit about my first years of teaching to encourage those of you who might be in that situation currently and provide a little nostalgia for my veteran teachers!

It’s ALIVE! So you have taken still life photos, are you ready to delve into photographing something that moves?!

Finding texture in photography adds a certain appeal to your images. Everything you see has a texture, and photographing to capture that texture can make your images much more relatable to the viewer.

Still life photography can sometimes be seen as an ancient, lost art, but you see still life photography everywhere today. Whether you are trying to sell your own homemade items (like at https://www.etsy.com/) or looking for a specific still life stock photography website (like https://www.istockphoto.com/) still life images are still widely used in marketing and advertising.

Being as the definition of photography is literally “to draw with light” (in Latin), you better believe that controlling light is really important! There are lots of different directions we could study when talking about light in photography, but for now, we are just going to study one category: natural light.

Natural light is the easiest light for a beginner to master. Below are a few different conditions in which you might take pictures and why you might want to take pictures there.