Thing 2: Photo Fun

Photography and photo editing have always been one of my favorite hobbies. I got into it in high school when I took a photography class and used a 35mm camera and developed my own photos in the dark room. Mostly I took photos of my dog and if you look at my Instagram account, you'll see that some things never change. Since I don't have my own dark room I've moved on to the world of digital photography. When I got an iPhone the first app I downloaded was Instagram and it remains my favorite app to this day.

I'm also a SnapChat user, although I have mixed feelings about the app itself. I don't find it very user friendly and the chat feature leaves a lot to be desired. I'll stick to iMessage for texting. But it's a great way to easily send pictures of my dog to all my friends.

For this assignment I mostly focused on how to get my students more involved in photography itself rather than social media, since I work in a PK-6 building and the vast majority of my students are under the age of 10. While I'm sure a lot of my 5th and 6th graders use social media, most of my students do not.

I am fortunate enough in this building to have a digital camera in the library and have thus become the one to take pictures at various school events. I don't mind at all since photography is one of my hobbies. But after reading a few of the articles for this assignment, I've realized this would be a great opportunity to get some of my students involved. It wouldn't take long to teach a few interested students how to work the camera (most probably already know!) and how to transfer the photos onto a flash drive to give to the principal to put on the school website.

Going farther than having my students be the ones to photograph school events, I think it would also be great if they were to capture day to day happenings in the library. They could then edit the photos and either make them into digital collages or print them out and make a physical collage with poster board.

For my own exploring for this assignment, I chose to look at PhotoShop Express. In the past I've used the GIMP for photo editing. The GIMP can do a lot, but it is also very frustrating to figure out. I found PhotoShop Express incredibly easy to figure out. With it, I edited this picture, taken 3 weeks ago,  of the Christmas tree farm my family always goes to to pick out our tree every year.

Since it's the end of 2016, I also figured I would include my Instagram Best Nine for 2016. It analyzes your Instagram account and finds the nine photos with the most likes from the past year, then puts them into a collage. Link here.