Ask the Experts, Episode One: Photography

Thank you for joining us on Ask the Experts. I’m your host, Tim Bogatz. And over the course of these episodes, I will be talking with art teaching experts and guiding us through a deep dive into a variety of different media.

Each of the questions you hear today have been submitted by a member of our art teaching community. No matter if you are a veteran teacher looking for new ideas, a brand new teacher looking for some guidance or an experienced teacher who wants to improve their practice, I hope that the advice shared here about teaching each medium can help you.

As part of each episode the show notes will include a plethora of resources to help your teaching if you want to learn even more. Today’s episode is about photography and my guest will be Christina Brown. Let me bring her on to start the discussion and answer our questions. All right. Christina Brown is joining me now. Christina, welcome to the show. To begin with, can you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you or your teaching?

Absolutely. I’m so excited to be here, Tim. I’m Christina Brown and I am a high school art educator in the north Texas area. I have been teaching for almost a decade and with six years experience in the high school classroom. I have a background or a undergrad degree in photography, and I currently teach photography, graphic design and AP art and design. And I also am in the grad school program with AOEU as we speak.

Oh, that’s awesome. And yeah, getting close to your master’s, which is fantastic. Congratulations on that and thanks for coming on and being our expert today. We have a lot of questions for you from teachers just all over the country about all things photography. We’re going to go ahead and dive in.

The first question is from Elise in Florida. And Elise says, “My kids get bored with doing everything on screens, or maybe that’s me. LOL. I looked into setting up a darkroom, but that seems to be way too much. What are some other ideas or alternative processes when it comes to photography and what supplies do I need for them?”

Okay, Christina, I know you’re an expert at alternative processes in particular. Know you do a lot of cool things with your kids. Yeah, I would love for you to just jump in and take over on this one.

Oh, Elise, I can feel your pain. I absolutely understand the boredom. Even we get bored with just screens. Unfortunately, the romance of just taking a digital photograph and editing the photograph is no longer as interesting to the students now because they have access to these amazing cameras on their phones and they’re constantly on their screens.

And so with that, I’ve noticed that I’ve had to really alternate alternative processes throughout the curriculum each year. I’ll have maybe a small unit where we’re digitally taking pictures and editing. And then I’ll throw in an alternative process just to keep them going and not into a monotonous routine of only using the screens. And so a couple of suggestions I have for you. Again, dependent on what supplies you have access to, I’m going to throw some out there and you can pick and choose what fits your situation.

One thing that doesn’t take a whole lot of supplies in terms of expense is collaging with magazines. And so you can deal with composition and then looking at composition in photographs within magazines to create an appropriated imagery type of unit. As well as you could do acetone transfers with Xerox copies, the old school Xerox or laser jet type printers are the ones that you can do acetone transfers with. And so I like to use this as an intro into printmaking with the students and still incorporating photography.

A favorite I have, if you have access to either a UV light set up or if you live in a sunny area is cyanotypes, which that is very, very cost-effective and it’s not super toxic for the kids to have to deal with. But with cyanotypes, you can buy kits that are fairly cheap and inexpensive for students to create prints using the sun. And cyanotypes, regardless of the student and how not interested they are with school, cyanotypes usually bring a sense of awe to their faces whenever they see their prints come through.

And then, last one I have, again, dependent on the equipment you have access to, kids really love scanograms. If scanners can become relatively inexpensive, especially if a person is throwing out a printer that has a scanner attached to it. And they can scan their faces, they can bring objects to scan. And so, it’s a unit of camera list photography is what I like to call my alternative processes. And so, I think there’s a lot of options out there that you could explore that are sans screens because yeah, we all need a break from screens from time to time.

Yeah. Those are all great suggestions. And yeah, like you said, they’re accessible. They’re some things that are not terribly expensive and not that difficult to do. I think those are all very good suggestions.

And then you mentioned, Christina, a little bit about kids have these amazing phones with great cameras on them, and that leads us into our next question. This comes from Jordan in Utah and Jordan says, “I have a couple of nice DSLR cameras and could get some more with my budget money next year. But I hear all about how the new iPhones are supposedly the greatest cameras ever and even old phones have pretty decent cameras. Is it worth spending my limited classroom money on more cameras or should I just have kids shoot using their phones? And if they’re using their phones, what should I spend that money on instead?”

Oh, Jordan, same struggle I have, but because I have about six DSLRs, but I have 32 kids and most of them have phones. And so, with my specific situation, again, I’ll give you a couple different scenarios that you could run into, but the way that our district is broken up is for the beginner intro class, we just focus on cell phone photography, composition and lighting.

And so that could take an entire year just learning how to take pictures with what you have because you can take a picture with a box and a hole in it. But if you have a few DSLRs and you want to focus your energy on really showing them control on shutter speed and how to actually control your camera, because the camera phones can’t really do that. You don’t have the same amount of control unless you have a specific app that allows you to shoot with manual function.

But even those, it’s not the same thing as shooting with a DSLR. If you wanted to focus your time and energy on the actual technical aspects of a DSLR, you could break your students up into groups and rotate. I’ve even seen on some social media teacher groups that I’m in that some teachers have the exact same situation. And what they’ll do is have half their class working on digital editing or they’re on their laptops using Photoshop or Photopea, whatever you have access to. And the other kids are focused using the DSLRs and they’re rotating.

Our problems… I don’t want to say problems. Our situations are very common. I feel we don’t all have a class set of DSLRs. But let’s say you wanted to focus on just cell phones, I would suggest that you could spend your money on printer ink, paper, as well as props or lighting setup. Again, depending on what you want to focus on, you could jump into that alternative processes too, where you’re printing the photographs, you’re working with them, you’re cutting them up.

I think luckily nowadays with how good the cell phones are, we don’t have to worry about getting low quality photos with kids who just have cell phones or access to cell phones, but now we can run a different direction with it since we’re not only having to use DSLRs to get high quality photos.

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing I would add to that too is the idea of having six cameras versus 24 cameras is thinking about where are you going to store 24 cameras?

Absolutely.

How are you going to keep track of 24 cameras? And that can be a huge headache. Personally for me, I’m not the most organized person in the world. And I know if you gave me 24 cameras, I’m going to struggle. I really am. I can keep track of a half dozen, but if you really a bunch, you need to make sure that you have systems in place to do that.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I think that’s a great suggestion with budget money. Just look at what happens after those photos are done. Can you print them? Can you do other things with them? Can your money go toward just the end goal with some of those things? And I think that’s a really good suggestion there as well.

Okay. Next question comes from Annie in Pennsylvania. “I’m new to teaching high school and just started teaching AP Art and Design. What advice do you have for students as to what should be in their portfolio and is it different than what they need for a college portfolio?”

I will just say when, if you’re old like me, AP Art and Design used to be AP studio art, and they just wanted the most beautiful finished pieces. And your college portfolio looked a lot like your AP studio art portfolio. However, AP is now doing art and design much more about experimentation and process and ideation and idea development and what you learn and how you change your ideas and how you develop all of these things.

However, I have not taught art and design because I’ve been out of the game doing this fun podcast for a while. Christina, I’m going to turn this one over to you. Can you talk about what they’re looking for with AP Art and Design? How that differs from what might go into a college portfolio now?

Absolutely. Since the AP Art and Design reformat, which happened in the school year of 2019 and 2020, they shifted from, as Tim said, the most beautiful pictures you’ve ever seen. They just went together visually in a form of a concentration. It has now shifted to an inquiry-driven, sustained investigation. Which if anybody has had an undergrad fine arts degree, it’s pretty much what we had to do our senior year.

And so, we are asking our seniors in high school to come up with a inquiry-driven, sustained investigation where they’re focusing on one idea and letting it grow through exploration. And so, what needs to be in their portfolio essentially, which I actually love the new reformat because it’s 15 slides, which doesn’t necessarily mean 15 finished works. And so students within these slides can show process images, journal entries, setups of their photographs alongside their finished products.

And so, they really, really want to see, as Tim said, their experimentation and process to getting to their final photographs versus just submitting 15 point and shoots essentially. And I will be transparent here, the photography medium in the AP Art and design portfolio, I would say is actually more difficult to score a higher score with merely just digital photography. Unless your setups are really out-of-this-world professional setup productions, the students really need to experiment past just digital photography in my personal experience with having students.

And so, they also will get to submit five selected works, which is again, their best of the best. It needs to show variety in what they can do and their technique and skill set. But I think exploring past just point and shoot, obviously showing their maybe visual journal entries, maybe they did print out their photographs and they wove them together. Alternative processes I feel really does help bump their scores up if they’re trying to show exploration. Because if you’re only doing one thing with one medium, are you really exploring?

The second part of your question on is it the same thing that they need to have in their college portfolio? I am not really sure because… And the way that when I went to undergrad, you didn’t have to show a portfolio until you were already in the college. With some of these art colleges where you do have to submit something just to get into the school, I would say that they need to show variety skill set as well as process. Because if we’re starting to gear towards what are the students making and why, I think they need to cover all three things.

Yeah, absolutely. And I would just say to add into that, if you have a kid who’s looking at a specific school or looking at art school, they probably have their own requirements for their portfolio for what they’re looking for. And so just have that kid work individually with that school. And they may say, “We need 12 pieces, and four of them should be drawing from observation and four of them…”

And so you can just follow those as needed. And the hope is that by the time your kid is a senior, they have enough work that they can pick and choose their best stuff and put that forward. But Annie, good luck to you. Thank you for writing that in. Okay, next question is a short one, but oh man, we could do an entire podcast on it. “Is there any use for a darkroom anymore?” That’s from Tatiana in California.

Full disclosure, back in, I don’t know what year, I want to say 2016, I wrote an article for the AOU magazine that said, “It’s time to accept that your darkroom is dead.” We all know just where I’m coming from on this one. And then about a year later, there was a rebuttal article that was why we should keep darkroom photography alive. And again, some great points.

I would just say in my experience, the chemicals are tough to deal with. The cost has continued to skyrocket, and it’s tough to find supplies. It’s tough to find the room to do that. And I feel like it’s so slow compared to everything that you can do digitally. I feel like you can learn with digital photography in just a couple months what it used to take years to figure out by going through the dark room. Anyway, that’s sort of my short answer, but Christine, I would love your perspective on just thoughts on the dark room and what it’s like in the classroom setting.

Absolutely. I laughed because I remember reading your article and I was like, “No, it’s not dead.” But I think depending on your situation, it may not be something that you can bring into your classroom dependent on your situation.

And so I personally, my own opinion is I think that they should be exposed to the dark room at least once, even if it’s just for pinhole photography. I completely agree with Tim on everything else is so much faster. It doesn’t take toxic chemicals, time, supplies, money. I absolutely agree with you on that. However, most of my kids have admitted too that their pinhole lesson is the only time that they were ever experienced or will ever get to experience dark room photography. And so, I believe that that one unit does allow them to at least understand where it started and how we’ve transformed into this quick medium. But there is still, that is where the foundation started. And why we can dodge and burn on Photoshop and why we have to…

I think it’s really great with teaching manual photography because they understand, “Oh, this box, the tape is the shutter speed. Oh.” I think it’s nice for foundation. But one cool thing is I did write an article that it’s not out yet, but it’s about pinhole photography. And there actually are chemicals now that are non-toxic from some bigger companies now. That is one of-

Oh, okay. I’m intrigued.

And so that is really cool. I didn’t realize that was a thing. I’m very lucky because the teacher before me has a ton of dark room stuff that I still am picking at. And so I’ve been really lucky in terms of that with budget.

Oh, and then to bring back in the AP portfolio, I had a student who was not interested in digital photography at all. She’s a painter. She loves the slow medium of painting. And when I introduced her to pinhole, she now has a 35 millimeter camera. She shoots with it, she goes and gets it developed, and she sees the romance in what photography was before cell phones.

I think, yeah, it’s like 50/50, but I’m a proponent for at least introducing them to it in terms of foundations because you have a lot of that history that’s attached to the dark room.

Yeah, I love that answer. Yeah, I mean, we might be to the point now where I could bring out the old 35 millimeter and some of my old photos and kids be like, “Oh, it’s vintage. This is so cool.” Yeah, like you said, the romanticism of it might be there at this point.

You have the white gloves on, just looking through the negatives. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. It’s good stuff. All right. Next question is from Gabriel in Iowa. And Gabriel says, “I get overwhelmed at all of the digital files when I have so many classes and so many assignments. Do you have any advice for how I can stay organized and how I can get my students to stay organized?” Christina, I’m letting you have this one too. You did an entire presentation for us a year or so ago at the NOW Conference with digital organization. What advice do you have for Gabriel?

Oh, I love digital organization, Gabriel. As Tim mentioned, I had a whole after pass regarding digital organization. Now while my desk, you can’t judge me on what my desk in my classroom looks like, but my file system inside my computer is organized. And so, what I recommend is most schools will have access to a free online web-based organization system, whether it’s Google, OneDrive, Microsoft. And so, I recommend using a tiered system with your folders as well as consistency in organizing and renaming all of your things.

One, my first suggestion is not waiting until the very end of the year to get all of your ducks in a row. Digital organization honestly takes… It’s just like going to the gym. You have to go and consistently put in a little bit each day. Versus I went and ran on the treadmill one time, have I lost the 10 pounds yet?

I recommend doing a tiered system. The way that I do it is I have my school years broken down into years, and inside that folder I’ll have my courses. Within those courses I will have the assignments. And then inside those, as you can probably follow, it’s the student examples and the lesson plans and whatnot. Having them within tiers that makes sense to you is the second tip.

And then the third thing is this takes a long time. Nope, I don’t say it takes a long time. It takes a long time to build the habit, but I would rename your files every time you throw something in there. And so even if they’re organized within your folders, let’s say you have student examples, I like to throw in a date, maybe a student initial and the assignment name within the file name. That way you can search those files without having to click through a million folders right away.

And then the last thing would be archiving your student works. If they’re submitting digital files, archive them after each assignment so you’re not having to search for them. Then next year, “Oh, wait, I did this assignment. I can’t remember in March. Where did I put those student examples?”

Archive those really good student examples that you want right after an assignment’s over. That way you don’t have to think about it a year from now because we’ve all been there. And so tiered systems, renaming as you go and then archiving right away. Those are my suggestions for a digital organization.

Yeah, I think those are all great suggestions. And I would say even though it seems like a pain, yeah, just rename things as soon as possible. Because once you go past the tipping point with that, then you have a huge project on your hands to try and get back to all of those. Even if it takes more time than you want, it’s important to stay on top of those things or it gets out of hand. Okay.

Next question is from Leon in Maryland who says, “I don’t teach photography but I want to. How can I bring it into my curriculum? If you have just two or three weeks and don’t have any equipment, what would you do? Is this something that’s possible for me?” Christina, any suggestions for Leon with limited time and limited equipment? How can you bring photography into your curriculum?

Leon, I’m so excited you want to bring photography into the curriculum in general because a lot of the time it gets passed off to the wayside. But I feel that photography is honestly one of the easiest ones to teach composition and the elements of art and design with.

And so, even if you don’t have equipment, I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to bring in historically what photography is. You could do artist studies, you could look at photographs and analyze them with your students and bring in what elements and principles of art they see inside the photographs. As well as you could try alternative processes, because if you’re teaching regular art, you probably have some printmaking supplies. Again, with the cyanotype things, those are all camera-less ways to have photography in your room without the technological equipment.

And then also, like I said, I like to bring in composition a lot. And so sometimes we’ll analyze either film stills or animations online. And even though that’s not necessarily photography, you’re taking pictures, you’re still looking at how does design work for the visual eye? And so, research artists, analyze and then bring in elements and principles, I think are ways that you could fill in those two to three weeks.

Yeah, for sure. And one thing that we talked about earlier is just a lot of kids have their phones with them. And so, if you are able to use them, if that’s allowed at your school, then yeah, utilize the fact that everybody has a camera in their pocket.

And see, you can probably do some simple things with that. Some simple beginning assignments. We may not be able to do anything super in depth, especially if you have a limited amount of time. But like you said, just teach them the basics, maybe let them do a couple point and shoot things if you have some interesting assignments. And we can link to some ideas for those types of assignments too. But yeah, I think it’s definitely something that anybody can bring in, even if you do have just a short amount of time.

Okay. And then at the opposite end of the spectrum here, this is from Ward in Florida, and this is a very big question, also made me laugh a little bit. But Ward said, “I just learned I have to teach photography next year, and I know absolutely nothing. Please help.” This is not necessarily a question, I guess, but if we were to frame it for Ward, what does Ward need to know? What does Ward need study in the next six months before August comes around to be ready to teach photography? What advice do you have for Ward? Where can you point Ward?

I’m so excited for you. Photography is so much fun. I will say I’m excited for you and embrace that you have this whole amazing new material or medium to teach. It is its own medium by… It’s definitely different than just teaching traditional materials, but it is, I think, important to see it as another art medium.

And so all the foundations, if you have the foundations of teaching art in general, it’s just, it’s getting at another medium. And so I would suggest is take a supply inventory and what we’ve talked about throughout this podcast, what type of curriculum are you going to be focusing on depending on your inventory. And so, with a lot of programs that maybe don’t have access to equipment, they are more art history based, maybe there are more alternative processes based.

I would definitely recommend seeking and networking through peers that you may know personally or maybe reach out online. There’s a lot of great groups online of teachers from all… Expertises? Experts, beginners, newbies that have curriculums galore. They have wonderful just cell phone photography curriculums. They have ones that do dark room. And we have a lot of really great episodes on the YouTube at Art of Ed that have dark room photography and all types of photography on there.

Of course, take it one step at a time. And depending on your experience with photography, you could take a course or do a revamp. And again, there’s free courses online or you can take one that maybe is a PD. Yeah, I would take an inventory and then see where you are from there so you can plan out your year.

Yeah. And I would just say, whether it is photography or any medium, don’t be afraid to tell kids that you don’t know. And don’t be afraid to learn along with them.

Absolutely.

And just say, they’re going to realize that this is new for you and that’s okay. Embrace that and be the example for them of this is how we learn new things. We are not afraid to try new things. We’re not afraid to explore and experiment. And sometimes fail and figure things out and just do it along with them.

And so, if there is a new process that you’re trying to teach, tell them. Say, “Hey, I have not done this before. We’re going to learn this together. Let’s see how it goes.” And just embrace the learning, embrace the failures if those happen, and just go through it with them. And then each consecutive year as you teach stuff, you’re going to get better and better at it.

And so, just don’t be afraid of not knowing things. And just, like I said, jump into it with your kids, learn along with them. And that’ll make things a lot more fun for them too. Yeah, don’t feel like you’re failing if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Just give it your best shot and kids will respect you for that. And you’ll learn along with them and it’ll be great for everybody.

They see right through us.

For sure.

They see right through us

For sure. Cool. All right. Christina, that was great advice for Ward and great advice for everybody who wrote in. Thank you so much. We’ll make sure we collect all of these ideas, put together a ton of resources for everybody to dive into if they’re learning or if they’re wanting to explore a little bit more with photography. But we appreciate your time, we appreciate your expertise, so thank you for everything.

Thank you so much, Tim. I’m so happy to be here. And hopefully some of the advice can help you all out that have questions. Thank you so much.

Thank you to Christina for her expertise and for taking the time to answer all of our questions. If you want to continue your learning, I want to highlight a few of the links that you can find in the show notes. If you’re a member of PRO or FLEX, that will be where you can find the best stuff. There are two incredible PRO packs, digital photography basics as well as creative approaches to beginning photography. There’s a great knowledge base there with classroom ideas and how to teach them and some incredible resources for both you and your students.

And there are also two items from FLEX curriculum. First, we have a link to an entire collection of digital photography lessons and resources. This includes videos, lesson plans, planning sheets, assessments, other resources for students, artist bios, career cards, and so much more. Literally everything you need to put together an entire unit or more on photography in your classroom.

Secondly, we have a list of digital photography lesson plans and a ton of resources that go along with that. And there are going to be, I believe, 24 lesson plans inside of there. 24 photography lessons from the FLEX curriculum and all of the associated resources that you’ll need to teach those.

And we’ll also have some additional resources that you might find helpful or that might pique your interest. We’ll link to some articles in the magazine, including the ones written by Christina. I’m also going to dive into the NOW Conference archives for some additional photography ideas, some digital organization basics, and some experimental processes. Finally, if you want to improve your own photography practice, we’ll link you to the AOEU graduate course for studio photography. Please explore, enjoy, and find the resources that are right for you and your students.

We appreciate you listening to Ask the Experts. This show is produced, edited, and engineered by me, Tim Bogatz, and is part of the Art of Education University podcast network. Stick with us through all of our episodes as we explore photography, ceramics, painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and more. Thank you for listening.