Still lilfe Photography

My 5th graders are going to town with photography this year. In thisclass, we talked about photographing interesting still lifes.

We talked about changing angles, closeups, and

just creative set ups that might be different from the normal still life pictures that we see. After looking at several photographs with the still life genre, we discuss different ways we could interpret and set up objects that were placed around the room. Students got all kinds of stuff out of my storerooms, my shelves, my closets and cabinets. Just about any thing they could find to use.

Believe me when I say, they got creative. With only two classes of 50

minutes each, they had to find their stuff, make their plan, set up their items, photograph them and then print them. You can't even imagine what my room looked like at the end of those two classes. I had still lifes EVERYWHERE! But I can't argue with the results. They really had to make alot of quick, quality decisions to get their final results. For the most part, everyone did great!

If you have any other really great ideas for subject matter for digital photograpy, please, please, please....let me know.

Studying Relief

My students really seem to just love this project. It seems so easy but they just get a real kick out of watching it develope into, what looks like, old, tarninshed silver relief patterns. We talk about relief and what that means in art. That it is a form of three dimentional art BUT it is only slightly three dimensional. Most sculpture can be seen from all sides but relief sculpture is viewed like a two dimensional picture. This one is of a tulip and has been created with shirt board, glue, and foil. Wooden stylis were used to etching into the heavy duty foil, after covering our cardboard motifs, which gave us some intricate little patterns, textures and details to enhance the overall piece. We used India Ink for the aging process by putting it on, letting it dry for a minute or two and then buffing it off to our liking. The results are amazing! Definitly a fun one to try!!!