Every One Can Create Photos
Photos are a fun, powerful way to express ideas visually and illustrate learned concepts.
The photo guide teaches pupils photography fundamentals, using the Photos and Camera apps to practice storytelling techniques – by capturing things, scenes, people, and moments. They’ll learn to consider angles, balance, and symmetry to tell stories through still shots.
This Module will enable you to:
- take considered photographs of objects in a variety of lighting conditions and at different angles
- consider placement, and distractions
- adjust focus and exposure
- practise using the editing tools in the photos app to optimise your photos and to bring them to life with annotations.
You will need
- Apple Camera and Photos Apps available for iPhone & iPad.
You are also advised to have downloaded the following free ibooks available from Apple Book Store:
- Everyone Can Create Photos on iPad
- Everyone Can Create Teacher Guide
- Everyone Can Create Teacher Guide – Early Years
NB: If you are using a school device managed by an Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution, each book and app will need to be purchased (no charge) and deployed through the MDM service. Your MDM administrator will need to know how many licences are required for each and which devices (or users, if set up as shared devices) you want to give access to.
The focus here is to start thinking like a Photographer and to experiment…
Everyday objects
Chapter 1, Pages 6 – 9
From the Everyone can Create Photos on iPad book
Think of everyday photos, and explore their characteristics to tell stories.
Have a look around you and find a simple inanimate object….
- Take a close look at it, turn it around, look at it from different angles….
- Pose it – chose somewhere you can sit it without too much background distraction or with a a diverse background
- What about the lighting – things can look very different when photographed in alternate lighting conditions or from a variety of angles.
- Move into different positions to frame your image and explore how changes in light and perspective impact your photo
- Zoom in and out.
Open your picture in photos and select Edit.
Here you find the editing tools. Explore the options to make quick enhancements to your photograph with
- crop, straighten and flip,
- apply enhancements and increase exposure
Next, your challenge is to give this everyday object, a character – perhaps a character that could be used in a story or around your classroom to highlight some key messages.
- Select the ellipses at the top right of your screen in edit mode
- Tap Markup: What characteristics can you add on?
It doesn’t matter how you rate your drawing capabilities, this is a chance to explore your creative inner-being to bring this everyday object to life – perhaps add some ears, eyes, mouth. hair for a simple edit.
At any point, you can select to revert your image, removing all of your changes and taking it back to it’s original state, so this truly is a time for free expression.
Take a photo walk
Chapter 1, Pages 10 – 11
From the Everyone can Create Photos on iPad book
Think of a theme and take a walk taking photos of objects that have something in common. This might be
- Colours: Vivid, clashing, or muted tones or your favourite colour
- Shapes: Triangles, circles, squares or stars
- Lines: Parallel, wavy, converging
- Textures: Weathered, reflective, rough, soft, peeling
- Patterns: Repeating lines, shapes, textures or colours
- Materials: Man-made or natural.
Buikd albums of your photos:
- Create a New Album, giving it a descriptive word appropriate for the photos you have taken; eg Red, Circles, Rusty Things… Tap Save
- Tap to select all the photos you want to add to the album – a blue tick will appear to show which have been selected.
- Tap Done. You will see your new Album uner My Albums.
- Create other Albums for other collections, sorting by different categories – photos can be in more that one Album.
- Lines: Parallel, wavy, converging
- Textures: Weathered, reflective, rough, soft, peeling
- Patterns: Repeating lines, shapes, textures or colours
- Materials: Man-made or natural.
Why does it matter?
While these might be simple, fun task… the aim here is
- to allow the time to explore and make mistakes,
- to guide our learners through the tools available,
critiquing their choices and
giving them the skills to confidently make choices
Think about how you might use this in the classroom, bearing in mind the discussions and statements shared during the Every One Can Create sessions about
- The benefits Creativity for learners
- What Creativity might look like in the classroom / for your learners
Apple believes that
- Taking photos of everyday objects helps students develop observational skills and find beauty in details around them.
- Personifying everyday objects offers students the opportunity to see things differently and think about ways they can use photography to tell creative stories.
- Building a collection of themed images helps students develop classification and categorisation skills.
Create a collage composition
Use Chapter 5, Pages 37 – 40
From the Everyone can Create Photos on iPad book
The classroom task is for you to this resource with your class.
Selct each of the options to consider how you might approach this task:
Where and when is this task to be undertaken?
- Are their sufficient opportunities for the children to achieve an outcome?
or
- Is the purpose of this activity to learn the principles, be introduced to the concept and explore the opportunities?
This task suggests that task the children with pictoraialising their name.
- Bear in mind that there may be limitations to find the letters that the children in your class need to complete their name – certainly for those with longer names vs those of us with simple names.
- You may want to think about tasking them to create some specific words or collate other images instead, relative to other areas of the curriculum that you’re working on.
- Does this work better as a collaborative project, where all can contribute to the outcome?
At each stage of this course, you are encouraged to review how each activity went for you…
Encourage your class to consider how this activity worked. How did they feel about the challenge or having the opportunities presented?
There is much value from experimenting and making mistakes if we allow ourselves to consider how we might make improvements.
Update your journal
- This not only gives you a chance to plan, reflect and review, your notes can also be uploaded to build your Apple Teacher Portfolio so that you can gain your Apple Teacher Accreditation.See the Module Materials section if you haven’t already accessed the Participant Workbook or the Apple Teacher Portfolio Template.
