Thoughts re Meetings January 6, January 20, and February 3, 2010
These three meetings we worked with the digital cameras and editing pictures. The first meeting, I showed them how to take pictures and we briefly discussed lighting. The basic rules, that the flash only lights up to a distance of 12 feet, and that the camera should not be facing into the sun, were the extent of the topic. After a reminder to be quiet for other after-school activities, they took pictures of each other and anything else they found interesting down the hall. The cameras are able to take pictures as close as three or four inches from the subject and we had very few out of focus pictures. They did better than I usually do with holding the camera still to avoid blurry pictures. The next meeting, I showed them how to open the pictures with Microsoft Picture Editor and work with several of the tools there. They learned these tools: Brightness and Contrast, Color, Crop, Rotate and Flip, and Red Eye Removal. By far the most popular was the Color tool. They experimented with changing the colors and how it changed the look of the picture. They did some interesting effects with changing colors and adjusting contrasts. Their favorite photograph was an owl and several experimented with changing the colors to great success. One student got into cropping and 
made a page full of eyes. He said it was going to be a bookmark. I guess he thought he could be looking at the book even when the book was closed! Several followed his example of cropping tightly around the owl's eyes. I have uploaded several samples. Another made an interesting effect by putting the red-eye removal tool repeatedly on his face and made a grey nose. I’m not sure what the point of that was, except that we all got a clear idea of how red-eye removal works. For our third meeting, the students wanted to continue with picture editing. Several hadn’t been able to attend the previous week and wanted to try editing; others hadn’t been able to print any pictures. The color printer is notoriously slow and seemed to be even stodgier when presented with the task of printing full color on several pages. We displayed our work in the hall and received many compliments.
These three meetings we worked with the digital cameras and editing pictures. The first meeting, I showed them how to take pictures and we briefly discussed lighting. The basic rules, that the flash only lights up to a distance of 12 feet, and that the camera should not be facing into the sun, were the extent of the topic. After a reminder to be quiet for other after-school activities, they took pictures of each other and anything else they found interesting down the hall. The cameras are able to take pictures as close as three or four inches from the subject and we had very few out of focus pictures. They did better than I usually do with holding the camera still to avoid blurry pictures. The next meeting, I showed them how to open the pictures with Microsoft Picture Editor and work with several of the tools there. They learned these tools: Brightness and Contrast, Color, Crop, Rotate and Flip, and Red Eye Removal. By far the most popular was the Color tool. They experimented with changing the colors and how it changed the look of the picture. They did some interesting effects with changing colors and adjusting contrasts. Their favorite photograph was an owl and several experimented with changing the colors to great success. One student got into cropping and 
made a page full of eyes. He said it was going to be a bookmark. I guess he thought he could be looking at the book even when the book was closed! Several followed his example of cropping tightly around the owl's eyes. I have uploaded several samples. Another made an interesting effect by putting the red-eye removal tool repeatedly on his face and made a grey nose. I’m not sure what the point of that was, except that we all got a clear idea of how red-eye removal works. For our third meeting, the students wanted to continue with picture editing. Several hadn’t been able to attend the previous week and wanted to try editing; others hadn’t been able to print any pictures. The color printer is notoriously slow and seemed to be even stodgier when presented with the task of printing full color on several pages. We displayed our work in the hall and received many compliments.
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