Photography Scavenger Hunt

New Buffalo High School students have been daydreaming in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite with their Photography and Design unit. The art of Photography is observing the world with a fresh perspective and manipulating those images to tell visual stories. Art is everywhere we look but it takes an artist's eye to see beauty in everything.

My students demonstrated their knowledge of the Elements of Photography through a scavenger hunt during a week of e-learning to practice composing images from their everyday surroundings. We also took part of a class period when we returned to in-person instruction to continue developing their camera skills by looking for interesting compositions within the school.

Using their school-issued laptops with the Adobe Creative Cloud, students learned skill-building exercises in photo editing and creative manipulations using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. The students learned how to recreate their images into photo collages, mirror images, and double exposure composites. It was exciting to see their work develop as they experimented with masking, layering, and digital painting.

To incorporate a hands-on element to the digital photography project, each student chose one of their photos to print off and deconstruct as a photo collage using mixed media materials. They could draw, paint, cut, tear, fold or reassemble the image in any way they chose working with paint, sharpies, and oil pastels.

It was interesting to see how each person took their work in a different direction even though they had photographed some of the same surroundings during the in-class photo shoots. What did they find interesting enough to photograph in their daily lives and what were they presenting for the viewer? With digital photography technology and editing tools more readily available then ever, it takes a deeper level of critical thinking to analyze and reflect on what is being photographed as works of art. Their artwork is evidence itself of just how unique every person is and how we all see things differently.

Learning Photography is important because it helps students to conceptualize composition and define their artistic intent in their artwork which can be applied to other media in drawing and painting. Since Photography encompasses such a diverse range of genres, I wanted the students to have exposure to the creative possibilities of photo manipulation by putting their own individual stamp of self-expression on their photos as works of fine art.