Photography

CREATING A MONTAGE OF SKILLFULLY SHOT PHOTOS
Allow 6-8 hrs for this module

This project consists of two parts.  To do well, you will have to take some great photographs, and you will also have to design and create a nice montage.  The photos can be taken outside of school on your phone or camera, and the montage will be created in class using Adobe Photoshop.

Taking really good photographs requires a great deal of skill and practice, but there are a handful of great principles that you can learn in order to speed up the honing of your photography skills. Check out https://digital-photography-school.com/ - an excellent website that will help get motivated students way ahead. Search these terms and see what you can learn "rule of thirds" "framing" "composition" "leading lines" "manual photography" "depth of field" "landscapes" "portraits" "close-up photography".

Once you've spent a little time looking through some of the tutorials on the Digital Photography School website, practice some of the principles and techniques you've learned and bring them to school to show your teacher and classmates. You can even take great photos on a phone-camera!

Here are some examples of previous student work. Have a look at them and see how they have used their camera creatively to improve the quality of each picture as well as how they have been able to communicate emotion and give us extra information about the characters in each picture. Think about how the different pictures relate to each other as well.

THE PHOTOS TASK

Choose a theme: Nature, buildings, roads, animals, cars, people... then take 24 photos that demonstrate an understanding of each of the following techniques.

1. a close up
2. a medium shot
3. a long shot
4. a high angle
5. a low angle
6. use of strong horizon line
7. rule of thirds
8. use of foreground and/or background to achieve a sense of depth
9. action shot/ capturing movement
10. leading lines
11. frame within a frame
12. symmetry

You will notice there are 12 techniques, so you should take two photos for each technique. 

Once you have your 24 photos, show them to your teacher and select the best 7 to 10 photos for your collage.

THE COLLAGE TASK

You are required to create a collage of your best 7 to 10 photos, using Adobe Photoshop.  You can be creative with this, but you should at least crop, resize, recolour (so they look like a set) and arrange the photos so your collage looks professional.

When you finish your photo collage, export it as a .jpeg file and submit it to your teacher for assessment.  Half of your marks will come from the quality of the photographs and whether they demonstrate the framing and composition principles above, and the other half of your marks will come from your arrangement of the photos.