From the category archives:
Expanding the classroom walls.
As a teacher of photography and journalism, and a publications adviser, I was always looking for ways to make my classroom bigger, more up-to-date and more interesting. Computers certainly helped, especially when photo CDs became available that could reinforce my lessons.
Much like shooting sports, capturing the peak moments in plays and musicals requires planning and good shooting technique.
To paraphrase Hamlet, “the play’s the thing” where the conscientiousness of the yearbook photographer is discovered.
Capturing sports photographically has always been one of, if not the toughest, assignment faced by any photographer. For some students, the challenge is welcomed. For others, just the word sports puts fear into their hearts. However, patience and practice can help any photographer become less afraid of the dreaded sports assignment.
Check out the latest single lens reflex cameras – either film or digital – in your local photo store and most, if they come with a lens, give you a small zoom – such as 18- 55mm or 28-90mm. Manufacturers are banking on the consumer wanting the variety of the zoom. Gone for the most part is the standard 50mm lens, the one that most duplicates our own vision. With these new zooms comes the challenge of how to use the varied focal lengths effectively.
Computer file management only needs two ingredients to be successful: simplicity and a willing staff. Consider the system used in 2004-2005 at Shawnee Mission North High School. It was simple so the staff used it, and it aided grading.
Whether we have a pleasant or a horrible experience creating a yearbook is not influenced by our quality of layouts or photographs. Most of us can even accept it and carry on if our page software occasionally does not behave. What really makes you despise or love this whole process is how organized you are.
Lower camera prices and higher pixel counts over the past couple of years have brought yearbook photographers out of the darkroom and into the light of computer monitors.
Trading in that 35mm camera for a film-less digital camera may be a way out of the darkroom but it is not necessarily the path to better yearbook photos. For the exchange to work, photographers need to understand the limitations of digital cameras and the advantages of using a combination of film and film-less technologies to handle a wide range of assignments.
I remember the first time I had to depend on a computer to help me create a yearbook. It was my first book and the staff told me it was easier to develop yearbook pages using the computer. At that time, I was completely computer illiterate and had every intention of staying that way. As far as I was concerned, computers were the spawn of you-know-where and I was having nothing to do with them.
Digital images are a hot commodity today with digital special effects showing up everywhere from magazines to television to movies to the Internet. More and more yearbook staffs are using digital images each year. It is truly the wave of the future in desktop publishing.
