I teach digital photography at a high school in San Diego and am always looking for new ways of teaching about depth of field—the amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in a photograph. It’s a concept that’s difficult for my students to grasp.
I’d been using the traditional way of teaching students about aperture, which is putting three objects next to each other in a line and photographing them—learning about how something looks in the foreground, middle, and background by alternately using f/4, f/11, and f/22. I found that this wasn’t working well with my students; I needed to switch gears and try something different.
A New Photo Lesson
I asked students to create their own worlds with toys. I thought it would be fun to do miniature photography as a triptych with a beginning, middle, and end, changing apertures and angles for each shot. Finally, students would each write a short story to go along with the photographs and present them to the class.
I was incredibly inspired by the quality of the resulting work from my students and the creativity of their stories. Each photo series and story was different from the next. Students were also very excited to bring in their own toys to photography. They were also able to really “see” and understand how different the subjects and backgrounds looked using different apertures. This project could be adapted for an age level.
Hogancamp and Mini-Photography
I began by showing students the trailer for mark Hogencamp’s documentary, Marwencol (2010). We talked about the stories behind Hogencamp’s photographs and what we thought and felt when we looked at them. I explained to students that they would bring in their own toys (or a relative’s) to photograph and write a connected short creative story. (I used www.remind.com to message students the evening before the assignment to remind them to bring in the props.)
Toy Stories
With my own camera, I demonstrated how to photograph the toys using the zoom tool and a variety of angles and f/stops, getting as close as possible to the subjects. I told students that their photographs would look different when they were shot at f/4.5 compared to f/13, so for each photograph they took, they should vary the apertures so they could see what looked best when they download the photographs.
Students worked in pairs so they could help each other come up with their individual stories, hold the toys, help with props, and so on. Some used the stairs as a backdrop, some the school track, and some the gardens. (I had extra toy son hand in case a student didn’t have any.)
Processing and Presentation
Students had the choice to keep the photographs straightforward and just adjust the brightness or contrast, or they could change them into black-and-white photos or give them a comic-book look in Photoshop. They then uploaded their photographs onto the program Padlet (this could also be done in Google Docs or other programs) and wrote a short story, one paragraph per photo. Students presented and read their stories to the class, showing how their photographs relate to their stories.
National Standard
Creating: Conceiving and developing new artistic ideas and work.
Kelly Moncure is a photography teacher at Rancho Buena Vista High School in Vista, California. www.moncurephoto.com
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