First Day Photo Challenge
Today we get out of the classroom, meet people, take photographs, and begin learning to see like a photographer.
Your goal is not to take the most photos. Your goal is to start noticing better photos.
Open the activity on your phone
Scan before we head outside.
Get your phone ready.
Canvas
Make sure you have the Canvas Student app installed.
Google Photos
Install Google Photos and sign in with the Google account your teacher tells you to use.
Today you will learn a phone → Google Photos → computer workflow.
Do not mindlessly take the picture.
The first angle you see is usually the most obvious angle. Before you press the shutter, ask:
- Could I get lower?
- Could I get higher?
- What happens if I move closer?
- What happens if I step farther away?
- Is there a stronger way to frame this?
Move your feet.
Close
Fill the frame with texture, detail, shape, or expression.
Far away
Show the subject in its environment and look for relationships.
Low / High
Change the viewer's point of view.
Off Center
Do not assume the subject belongs in the middle.
Work with your group.
- Stay in approved campus areas.
- Talk about the photographs before you take them.
- Get permission before photographing people outside your group.
- For at least five prompts, deliberately change angle, distance, or framing.
- Return at the time your teacher gives you.
Quality over speed.
What can you find?
- Opens and closes
- School logo
- Rolls
- School name
- Wet, other than water
- Olympic re-enactment
- Something orange
- Trip-to-Hawaii social post
- Gears
Keep looking.
- Cone shaped
- Reflects
- Favorite app on phone screen
- Magnifies sound
- Symmetrical
- Dissolves
- A Bearcat
- Peace sign, with permission
Finish creatively.
- Something high up
- Exercise pose
- Full-body portrait, unique angle
- Something tall
- Flat and shiny
- Campus memorial
- Multicolored
- Photo with principal, if available
Get the photos onto the computer.
- Open Google Photos on your phone.
- Make sure today's photos are uploaded or backed up.
- Log in to your classroom computer using the username and password provided by your teacher.
- Open photos.google.com.
- Sign in with the same Google account.
- Find today's photographs.
These photos are not throwaways.
Soon we will begin working with Lightroom. Today's photographs give you real images of your own to organize, evaluate, and edit.
Today
Capture and transfer.
Coming Soon
Organize, rate, crop, adjust light and color, and build a stronger image.
Choose one photograph that got better.
Show your group a photo where changing your position, angle, distance, or framing made the image stronger.
What did you change, and why did it help?
The camera records. You decide.
Composition begins before editing. It begins with where you stand, what you notice, and what you choose to include in the frame.