Assignment 2B « :: Digital Photography & Imaging

Assignment 2B – CNM Action Shots September 19, 2008

Posted by jhchen in Assignment 2B.
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Learning Experience & Difficulties Encountered

Due to the fact that it involves people, my team and I could anticipate the difficulties that we might encounter on the ground. We could forsee that students might be shy and hide away from our cameras. Hence, we brought along our zoom lens to prevent taking shots too close to them that might intimidate them.

We went to Mr. Alex Mitchell’s Interactive Storytelling tutorial (Wednesday 10-12pm) to take photos of portraits and the interactivity involved between students. The tutorial started off with a short lecture given by Mr. Alex. The class was then splitted into smaller groups to participate in the activity and most of the groups preferred to work on it on the floor. That day’s activity is on creating variations from an existing story (Little Red Riding Hood).

As expected, the students were quite shy at first and tried to hide away from our cameras. It was quite difficult to capture nice and still photos of portraits. To add on, students were sitting near to each other during the activity which made it even harder for us to capture a portrait photo. As for the interactive activities photos, it is rather difficult to position our cameras to capture students involving in the activity and the activity itself. I still remembered we have to kneel down and position our camera near to the floor when trying to achieve some of the action shots.

Furthermore, it is natural that everyone would like to look nice and serious in photos. Hence some of the shots came out to be quite artificial. To overcome this, we fixed on our zoom lens so as to reduce the tension between the students and us. It also reduced the awareness of being shot by our cameras.

To reiterate, one of the major difficulties that we faced was positioning of our cameras. As mentioned above, most of the teams preferred to work on the floor which limited the positioning of our cameras.

After the activity session, there was a short discussion session for each team to share with the class their story and lesson learnt from the activity. When a particular team was presenting, the rest would gather around them. We took quite a few action shots of the presenter with his/her activity cards.

Overall, the portrait and activity taking experience was fun and enriching. I learnt that taking photos of people is not as easy as taking photos of still objects. One has to take into account of the emotions of the people and the tension between the photographer and the people. If they were not taken care of, it would definitely become a hindrance.

Here are some photographs that I have taken for my assignment 2B:

Short Lecture

(Click on the image to view the higher resolution version)