Beyond The Selfie

THE FARR OFF LAND OF PHOTOGRAPHY

--Kailee Meyer

 

If some of you don’t know, Sterling High School’s new and fully loaded Intro. to Digital Photography class is filling up schedules. It’s a class for the artsy or non-artsy type, Photoshop intuitive, young photography scholar. If you signed up for the class thinking it’s just kids sitting around a classroom visualizing shots and shooting every inch the school has to offer, you’re half right. Although the picture-taking is a colossal part of it, you also gain editing skills and learn how to use Photoshop. These are skills of which first instructor of the class, Mr. Farr, had to learn himself.

Mr. Farr, who is seamlessly more accustomed to the video tech world, noted that he had Photoshop experience through workshops a few years ago, and that the class called for a refresher. Mr. Kozeniewski, who checks out the fourth block class during the day and is teaching it next semester, says he can use his own Photoshop experience in the class. Towards the end of last school year, he, Mr. Farr, Mr. Feeney, and Mr. Strauss worked towards putting a class together.

So in turn, Farr is not only teaching us but gaining some knowledge as well. Farr also stated his bit of surprise at the huge turnout of students who picked the class. A few months ago, when the class was finalized, Mr. Farr and the other instructors started to crack down and get a game plan; this of course left the most important part: cameras.

From then to around the beginning of this year was the time limit to get cameras (which are not cheap), computer software, and initial lesson plans. But alas, it’s the end of October and we’ve got over six groups of classes spread over the year and over a dozen shiny new cameras to play with.

Farr has said that since this is his first time teaching this class he had an idea of what he wanted it to be, but is basing it just a pinch off of his video classes. The projects you would see students working on are logos for the information you see on the morning news, or postcards. You can also see my personal favorite, our magazine covers, and the final project of finding a letter of the alphabet in different things and shooting that.

A lot of the techniques and angles in the Intro. to Digital Photography class are similar to the video tech classes, which makes Farr a good candidate to start the courses off. Each of the projects integrate photography and Photoshop skills and all of the outcomes lead to at least one being Sterling-related.

Mr. Farr’s teaching technique allows the students to work on a piece without him hovering or disagreeing until it is a finished product and becomes a class discussion. He says that when he sees the project completed he expects to be wowed, and him standing aloof allows students to be creative and worry only about their work.

With only a couple weeks left of the course Farr states that he’s happy with the progress of the students and can’t wait to hear the feedback from others teaching the class later in the year.