As we continue working in the Everyone Can Create Photo Guide, the PLP students are building their understanding of the still image from everyday objects and moving into Chapter 2: Portraits.
This chapter of the book we started by reviewing the skills together as a class, before practicing Activity 1: Make a self-portrait and Activity 2: Make a portrait with each other. The students had a lot of fun posing their friends and setting up a variety of shots.
The last activity, create a silhouette, was then assigned for homework. This allowed students to go home and use a family member or friend to complete the activity.
The last step was to complete the project ‘Create a Portrait from the Past’. The guide has a suggested twist at the end to recreate a historical portrait or work of art. So it seemed like a great chance to use Google’s Arts and Culture app as well. Students used the Art Selfie function to discover a portrait that looked like them and then used it to recreate their own selfie.
Since all PLP students have their own learning portfolios, they summarized their learning there, but also used a great tool from Knightlab to actually turn their portraits into a side by side comparison on their blogs
These activities really taught students a lot about taking a good photo of people. As Grace reflects, “what I’ve learned from it is that you need the correct camera angle and face to get a picture right”.
What means the most, however, is comments like this one from Noah: “I think this was a really exciting task and I really enjoyed it. I showed all these techniques through many of these photos and included some of my own creativity into them as well”. Nothing means more to us as teachers to have our students now only learn, but enjoy their learning!