The young know everything, what can we teach them?
The young knows everything within their sphere of influence.
The beauty of teaching photography is that it is a very visual (sometimes visceral) way to introduce young people to other spheres that they have never seen yet.
Dave, thanks for this thread by the way.
Teaching (not just the young) about photography has been in the forefront of my thinking since last year.
In fact, I have created an outline for a small group workshop that looks at photography as a personal pursuit that has the potential to enrich peoples lives through what I mentioned above: Broadened horizon across boundaries (geographical, time, social, and yes, sometimes spiritual).
The workshop is broken down into these topics:
1. Why Photography
This is about setting expectations, potential, and correlating those with the realities of life. Basically in this first session, I'll introduce people to the various sides of photography that can touch our lives in ways we never thought about before.
2. Choices
Photography is about choices, some binary, some others has more; some technical, some aesthetics, some moral, some subjective, or are they all subjective? By approaching photography from this angle, I try to introduce participants to effective decision making that will guide them as they grow. There will be some talk about technicality in this session, but it is the opposite of my intention to make this workshop yet another Aperture/Shutter-speed/ISO/Color-Theory mumbo-jumbo. Why? because in this day and age, you don't need to attend a workshop if you just want to know those.
3. Interactions
Defining interactions as both internal (between our mind, eyes, and camera) as well as external (between scene, subject, light). In this session, I'm going deeper into how an image is formed, first in our mind, based on what we have observed before, or based on our impressions of a memory. How to translate those into the subject and scene in front of us. I'll introduce participants to the theory of synthesizing a theme or message as a path to grow photographically. I am going to show videos of the masters to see how their mind works.
4. Outcome
In this last session, it's all about the outcome. What is photography without the final goal of publishing or exhibiting your photographs in some ways. From editing, post-processing, to making your own photobooks, to joining/organizing projects such as the excellent ones we have right here on RFF, to exhibiting in a gallery, should opportunity knocks. What I wanted to impart to the participants here is the sense of respect towards your own work. A healthy respect will go a long way towards motivating us to put the necessary effort so our photographs are publicly displayable *and* conveys the message that we envisioned. This session is also about how to reap the reward from your pursuit of photography.
My thinking is breaking the workshop into four sessions, it would make it easier for people to arrange their schedule around it. I'm envisioning 8 people per workshop, so the amount of interaction and overcoming shyness can be maximized.
Of course sprinkled in the workshop various gear-talks, favorite this and that, and lots of viewing photographs, and exercises to drive the topics in.
What do you guys think?
