^{College of Education} _{WSUROAR photography internship}

“Say cheese!”

This photography internship is meant to help WSU ROAR students have a grasp of basic photography skills. Photography is a skill that can bring you a lot of joy throughout the course of your whole life. And you might even be good enough to make some money at it.

But, let’s just take a step back and remember that we won’t become experts overnight! We’re going to start small.

The overall goals of this internship:

Have a good understanding of camera settings.
Shoot photos (people, buildings, events).
Sorting or “culling” photos.
Photo editing.
Publishing photos.

By the end of this internship, what we’re really hoping for is an online portfolio that you can show off.

While we will continually talk about basic principles throughout this internship, even after we’ve completed them, we will start a process of “Learn. Practice. Sumbit. Evaluate.” from step two: shooting photos. That doesn’t mean we are skipping step one… we’ve already done this… but we don’t need to review it again.

Before we begin

You’ll need to know how to move photos from your camera to your computer (PC). I found one video that was pretty good at explaining… it’s focused on Mac but she talks about PC. We can also set up a time to meet in person for me to show you once you get your camera.
You’ll also need to know how to move your photos from your computer to Google Drive. I have made this video to show you how to do this.

Week 01 — February 21-23

Up until now, we’ve worked on aperture and rule-of-thirds. This week, we’ll be talking about something called point of view (POV). If every single photograph we took was at the same level as where we were standing, that would be kind of boring. There’s more to perspective than just height, but I think that is the important thing we want to focus on right now.

Just as an example, here are few photos I think are fantastic BECAUSE of the low angle!

POV low

This was taken by a friend of mine from high school. The building is incredible. But nothing about the rain would have stood out as strongly except for the fact that the camera was held down near the ground. By having a low point of view, it not only shows the water on the pavement, but it creates a greater sense of awe at the building.

POV varied

These photos were taken by a friend of mine from high school. You can see that some of these shots are at a standing level and some are at a low level. There’s a lot of interesting perspective when it has the low angle, including something we call “leading lines” which we will explore later.

POV varied

Learn (MONDAY)

Practice (TUESDAY)

Spend two hours outside, where you have plenty of room to shoot. Practice shooting at multiple heights. That could include from your head to your waist (normal POV), holding your camera higher up (high POV), or way down near the ground (low POV). Make sure you keep an example of each of these so we can compare them and

Submit (TUE/WED)

After you spend time practicing the various shots, upload them all to Google Drive! That means you need to transfer them from your camera to your PC and then to Dropbox. You don’t need to submit all of them, just the ones you like the best that you feel complete the assignment.

Submit photos

Evaluate (WEDNESDAY)

After you spend the week working on the assignment, and have submitted your photos, we will meet on Zoom for 5-30 minutes to review what you’ve done and decide on ways we can improve. We’ll also decide whether you’re ready to move to the next step or we should do more practice on the current step.

Our meeting will be on Wednesdays at 1:00 p.m.

Join Zoom Meeting

Week 02 — February 28 – March 02

Up until now, we’ve worked on aperture and rule-of-thirds, and point-of-view. This week, we’ll be talking about photographing buildings. This is a really tricky thing because the lines of the building often don’t match well with the four sides of a photo (top and bottom). They may always look crooked or askew! There are a few videos that I think are great.

Shooting straight up

Truthfully, this is just off what we’d want it to be at the top, slightly not parallel. However, the building is very looming by shooting straight up.

Angled to bring out parallel

Had we shot this building from this spot, but without angling the camera, we’d have had a mess of lines. But by angling the camera and making the top of this building line up almost perfectly parallel with the top of the camera frame, it led to a very clean shot. And the angle actually adds fun.

Using other objects or combining elements

We absolutely could have just shot these two buildings side by side by standing way, way back (if we could even get that far back before running into another building), and doing it that way. Instead, we increased the positive viewer experience by decreasing depth. This was done by simply changing the angle we were shooting at and making sure that we added a foreground element of the tree (ensuring it was parallels to the side of the frame).