Honest to blog?

Advanced photo students use the classroom lab to work on creating their blogs.
Photo by Jessica Young.

I hated classes in high school where my teachers had me do a worksheet, take a quiz or fill out some paper just for the sake of doing it. I hated busy work and I loathed going to classes that I knew were laden with it. As I have defined my philosophy as a teacher, I have worked hard to create assignments that are fun and meaningful for my students. I want to teach them important skills, but I want to see them apply them to their every day life--not just answer questions about them on a test.

With my advanced photo class, I decided that sharing their work beyond my classroom was an important part of their experience. As a result, I crafted this blogging project. For each assignment the photo students complete, they will be writing blog entries and posting their photos. It is my hope that they will become accustomed to writing about their artistic process and sharing their work with the world.

I have set up the assignments so that the students complete the following with each post: a brief summary of the assignment (in their own words), a discussion of the process it took for them to create the images and an evaluation of their work. They will also be posting the pictures that they turn in, with captions and bylines. The final component of their blogging assignment is to comment on the work of their peers. I think this element will help them practice writing about photography in a way that is both professional and constructive.

As of today, all of the students have blogs up and running with their first posts. Some struggled more than others, but it appears that everyone is getting the hang of it. While there were some groans and rolled eyes when I reminded them about our process, I think this is a component of the class that the students will enjoy. I also have enjoyed reading their posts so far and sharing their blogs with our faculty. It is going to be a great way to showcase the work we are doing in class every week.

Advanced photo students work on creating their blogs during class time.
Photo by Jessica Young.

Multiplicity & Double Exposures

In our first class meeting of the year, I had my students write about the kinds of projects they wanted to tackle. I haven't taught Advanced Photography as a stand-alone class before, and I wanted to build a curriculum that was centered around what my students WANTED to learn. Photography has only been course offering at OGHS for three years, so it has taken some time to build the program to a point where students were ready to move on to the next step, to an advanced class.

The reflections that my students provided helped me craft our first project. They wanted to learn how to make "copies" of themselves in photos. They also wanted to learn how to layer pictures inside of one another. So, I set to work doing my research. What was the easiest way to teach these concepts? Our cameras don't have a multiple exposure setting, so I knew I'd be relying on photoshop for the layering effects in both pictures.

As I approached multiplicity with the students, I explained to them that they were essentially creating many versions of themselves in the same photos. They would need to set up a "scene" in which they would appear many times, but the background would remain the same. Then, they would import their various images and just cut their subject out of each layer, until they had several of the same person in a given shot.

While these students are actually twins, they are not identical. The multiplicity project
let me duplicate one of the twins to add a funny commentary to their senior picture.
Photo by Jessica Young.

When it came to the double exposures, the students were really impressed with photos that used silhouettes to create an outline, while the inner part of the image was filled with an alternate scene. For these photos, I had the students shoot their own portraits against a plain background and then either photograph or search for a landscape or background image to blend with their own. For many of them, they struggled to find images large enough to blend with their own photos. Many of them did not understand the difference in pixels per inch and dimensions. This will have to be a future lesson for them, so that they can match their image sizes more accurately.

I used photos like this one to demonstrate to the students
how their multiple exposures would turn out. This is one of the sample
images that I provided the students with, along with some youtube tutorials.
Photo by slickphotography.

Overall, I feel that the students were more successful with the multiplicity version of the projects. While they all created images for both types of exposures that were interesting and creative, I think they had more fun shooting the pictures that allowed them to multiply themselves. For many of the students, I think the meticulous detail and steady hand that the multiple exposures required became tedious. I also think that they did not manage their time very well, so they were rushed in completing their multiple exposures, while they had the luxury of time on their side with the multiplicity effect.

Shoot!

This is me teaching at a JEA convention in
San Francisco in April 2013. Photo by Amanda Knight.

My name is Jess and I teach beginning and advanced photography at Orange Glen High School in Escondido, California. I have been teaching for six years and also advise the yearbook and newspaper at OGHS. The photography program started three years ago and it has been an exciting experience. I work hard to create projects that are fun and meaningful for students, while teaching them important skills that they can use outside of the classroom. I enjoy teaching because I like making connections with students and watching them fall in love with what they are learning.

I earned my Masters Degree in Education from UC San Diego in 2012. I got my teaching credential from SDSU in 2008 and my BA from SDSU in 2007. My degree is in journalism, with a minor in anthropology. I have been involved with scholastic journalism since I was in the eighth grade, when I joined my middle school yearbook staff. It was during my time on yearbook staff that I was introduced to darkroom photography and I have been addicted to taking pictures ever since.

I first fell in love with photography in the darkroom of my middle school. I was fascinated with the process of printing and developing pictures and became addicted to the craft. Throughout the rest of middle school, high school and in college, I could rarely be found without my camera. I quickly became more comfortable seeing the world through my viewfinder than actually experiencing things firsthand. As my experience and my exposure to technology progressed, I began to transfer my medium from film to digital and started learning the language of Adobe Photoshop. And while I am still a 35mm fan at heart, I appreciate the power and creativity that Photoshop facilitates.

My professional training in photography is minimal; much of what I know how to do is self-taught. The basics were taught to me in that same middle school darkroom, which doubled as classroom. From there, I’ve learned through trial and error, books and experience. As my knowledge has accumulated, my skill set has expanded and my perspectives have changed.

When I first started taking pictures, I loved the simplicity of landscapes. Growing up in Southern Oregon, surrounded by vibrant wildlife, I had millions of opportunities for great, scenic pictures. Moving to San Diego to further my education, I began studying journalism and started seeing another side to photography. As I learned more about storytelling with words, I realized that telling stories with pictures can be equally as powerful. I now love the layers that a photograph holds—the story behind the subject, the story that the photographer sees, the story that the composition or technique tells. As a photographer, as a teacher and as a journalist, what I appreciate most about photography is that the perspective and story changes with each new set of eyes that sees a photo.

This is a time lapse photo that I took from Normal Heights,
looking down into Mission Valley. Photo by Jessica Young.