We were lucky enough to make two visits, a week apart, to Bolton St. Catherine’s Academy to work with groups of Year 9 and 10 students, each with a different theme.
The school had recently added photography to their curriculum and staff we met were keen to get some additional input from practitioners – to feed both staff and student ideas.
The brief with Year 9 students was to add to their digital photography skills and also, at the same time, look at narrative sequences to tie-in with curriculum work – all within one day-long workshop, which wasn’t a problem.
Our day started with intros from two of our team, both professional photographers, and then it was quickly on with some skills development. Students learnt about freezing and blurring motion for creative and technical effect before moving on to looking at how different focal lengths (zooming in and out) could have an impact on perspective, viewpoint and scale. Practical demos and exercises were used for this workshop, accompanied by worksheets, to help learning in different styles and of course we were on-hand to reinforce the learning.
Once the groups had downloaded and reviewed the work from these experiments, and done a group critique, we moved on to developing ideas for short picture stories – our narrative sequences.
Having been looking at discrimination elsewhere in their studies the group’s were to use this topic as their starting point. After some mind-mapping and storyboarding the teams were keen to move on to creating their image sequences, before downloading the final images to our iMacs, adding any finishing touches in Photoshop (any cropping, colour and tonal corrections).
The session finished with the projection of the finished pieces to class; each team presented their final idea and images to their peers for some instant feedback.
