Digital Photography

The education system is rapidly changing its dynamic in order to keep up with a fast paced technological world. In this capacity, learning tools are also being overhauled. One aspect with which education is expanding its perimeters is with digital photography. Though this art may seem experimental, the benefits towards increasing the knowledge of students and allowing teachers to interact in a different level with students are quite extraordinary. In the following essay, the educational benefits of digital photography will be introduced, as well as how effective a learning tool digital photography truly is will be discussed.

In the world of education, the one thing that should be aimed towards is heightening knowledge base, and this can only be done by keeping up with the technological world. With the oncoming age of color introduced in photography in the 1930’s and 1940’s as the encyclopedia elaborates, “Nonetheless, color remained a sidelight in photography until the 1930s because it required considerable patience and expense on the part of both photographer and printer.

The dominance of color in terms of reproduction and everyday picture-taking did not begin until 1935, when Kodak started to sell Kodachrome transparency film, and was completed by the introduction of color-print films and Ektachrome films in the 1940s”. With color photography, the realm of the fashion world drastically changed. The limits of black and white and sepia toned magazine covers gave way to brilliant exhibits of color combinations, and a wide range of fabrics that women and men could now see, duplicate, or buy.

Fashion photography changed from depicting high-class society women to models in every day clothing. Professional photographers were then counted on to resonant the possibility of how fashion should co-exist with society. With Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar photographers were hired full time to create, in the magazine, a gallery of fabric eye candy dressed on a model with a backdrop. The most notable photographers at the time were pictorialists , Edward Steichen and Englishman Cecil Beaton. The incorporation of art into photography made the photographs more believable as high fashion.

Steichen and Beaton glamorized the models with enhanced lighting effects, which lionized the models and made the magazine world believe that fashion through photography was otherworldly. Among new techniques being used, the online encyclopedia states, “American Edward Steichen and Englishman Cecil Beaton, both one-time pictorialists. These photographers began to use elaborate lighting schemes to achieve the same sort of glamorizing effects being perfected by Clarence Bull as he photographed new starlets in Hollywood, California.

Martin Munkacsi initiated a fresh look in fashion photography after Harper’s Bazaar hired him in 1934. He moved the models outdoors, where he photographed them as active, energetic modern women”. So began the movement of high fashion. In the movement, the use of fashion as advertisement was key in developing a market for fashion photography. It is through marketing advertising, that fashion photographers began to be highlighted, as the encyclopedia states, “The new approach to photography in the editorial content of magazines was matched by an increasingly sophisticated use of photography in advertisements.

Steichen, while also working for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines, became one of the highest-paid photographers of the 1930s through his work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency”. These photographers, as well as others, helped to make advertising an art form through use of portraying model’s hands in product placement, and altogether catering to ever-widening audience of magazine buyers. Fashion photography changed through the utilization and realization that product sold only through its modeling and photographic depiction.

One very important aspect of the benefits of using digital photography in the classroom is that the brain’s adaptive learning hinges primarily upon visual stimulation. Students themselves are prone to evaluating and storing information more cohesively when it is presented in graphic form (Greame, 2003). In the classroom setting, when digital photography is in use then, the students stand a better chance of learning the necessary instructional material. Digital photography then aids the student in not just learning material, but excelling in the given subject. As Greame futher states,

The creation and display of visual imagery have always been considered effective in reinforcing learning processes, and the development of photography as a learning tool brought new dimensions of creativity and self-expression, interactivity and collaboration, to classroom possibilities everywhere…The limitations imposed by processing technicalities and the inevitable time-lag have been eliminated by the use of digital photography, which also brings a bonus connection to a variety of ICT learning experiences, most particularly in the areas of digital literacy and graphics manipulation, but extending in applications across the curriculum.

Visual imagery and by extension, digital photography, is of great and significant use in enhancing the learning experience and allowing the students to benefit from visual stimulation and the extended ability to learn information better and more efficiently. The process of digital photography also eliminates the need for a dark room and the expenses therein.

Also, it allows for teachers and other educators to dispense of using their funding for development because with digital photography the access to film is easier with a simple input device jacked into the computer and the photo uploaded so each student can see it either on the computer, or the teacher can simple print it out for themselves. This is a very good benefit to education because the cost of buying film, and having it processed has now become an unnecessary expenditure and one in which the school board will be happy to be rid of, too.

As Apple Education Resources puts it, One of the most important benefits of the Mac-based photography curriculum, Strembicki says, has been the creation of WUStL’s “digital darkroom. ” Students can connect film-based, medium-format Hasselblad cameras that accept digital backs to their PowerBook systems via FireWire. After downloading their images and doing any necessary clean-up or manipulation, the students then send the images to a film recorder which exposes them onto regular film.

With film in hand, the photographers can then go into the “wet” darkroom and create traditional prints…Strembicki adds that the digital darkroom is far more cost-effective than the wet environment. “The huge advantage to going digital is that the output price is really low,” he says. “Using the Macs allows students to be more productive, and enjoy all the advantages that digital technology offers. ” In education, especially in the area of cost, decisions are made and altered according to how it will affect the school’s budget.

With digital photography a lot of the cost of photography is cut. Students who are exposed to digital photography are also being allowed to delve into a whole new realm of creativity that enhances their ability to be enthusiastic about learning. The goal of education is to permit the student to explore new and different dimensions of their self, and with digital photography this is happening. Digital photography is affective as a learning tool because it engages students as well as teachers.

In learning, the students are also creating and generating an output of art thanks to digital photography. Also, if a student takes the wrong photo, or a bad photo, all that needs to be done is to push a delete button instead of spending the money of developing film: This is easier, quicker, and more cost effective. Digital photography is not just for use in the art classroom, but spreads its technology to each subject area.

As a learning tool, students become interactive with the use of digital photography and in certain instances they are prone to be dependent on a group if a certain projects requires it, which allows the students to expand their knowledge base of digital photography by asking each other questions and finding out together what the technology is capable of accomplishing. While interacting with the camera and using it for school projects students are not only learning about their given subject but they are also learning about the technology of the camera.

Digital photography is a continual learning process, as APTE Professional Education Development Group states, Digital photography can be used at every phase of an instructional unit. If used at the beginning, students might take photographs for a particular purpose, such as recording a class field trip, and write captions for each photo back in the classroom. Digital photographs may be used during or in the middle of a project or module. Students can observe and digitally photograph the daily growth of mold on bread, or the seasonal changing colors of leaves on deciduous trees.

Later, they can write and report on the captured, observed changes. Students might write a draft of a story or historical event, then take pictures to illustrate their story, editing their written and photographic work as they progress. Digital photographs also make a great final presentation for projects in the classroom, as well as yearbooks, newsletters, and school newspapers. Digital photography then is capable of expression and use in each subject area and also allows students to enhance their knowledge of photography itself .

Photography is about experimenting, and the students thrive in instances when they are allowed to create, and to make mistakes by themselves, and to find out what happens on their own. Digital photography is a creative learning tool because almost every school-aged child can use it. The power of observation is required, and the way in which digital photography increases the student’s own part in the creative process is what makes digital photography integral to education and stimulating for students.

For teachers also, digital photography has revamped the way in which they present material in the classroom. Among a list of enhancements that digital photography brings the teacher, it allows them to teach in new dynamics through enhancing lesson worksheets, overhead projection, e-mailing to students and attaching digital photos for specific lesson plans, setting up a web page and sharing photos through that page so that students don’t have to visualize but can see the photo for themselves.

In lower grade levels such as elementary schools, teachers can use digital photography to make merit badges, and certificates of achievement to improve a student’s self-esteem. Digital photography may also be implemented to assist the learning impaired students for a particular lesson plan, or it can be used for taking pictures on field trips and copying the pictures on a disk and including that disk in a digital yearbook . One of the more dominant areas in which digital photography is implemented is in slideshow presentations.

Any use that a regular photo has, is made easier for digital photography because pictures can be automatically uploaded into a computer and can be delivered to a recipient very quickly thanks to email (Keith Lightbody, 2006). Digital photography then is a very unique and diverse in the classroom setting. Not only does it challenge students but it also permits the teachers to bring in new study material and new ways in which to learn a lesson in the classroom and outside of the classroom.

Thanks to this technological advancement, teachers are stimulating their students to new heights of creativity. Digital photography is not only cost efficient but it also allows students to make mistakes and to easily correct their mistakes through photo-workshops such as Adobe. Students are engrossed in what they are capable of developing with digital photography, and that is why it is an effective learning tool.