Project Name: Digital Photgraphy
Year: 2010
Funder: Reaching Communities
Partner Organisation: Cotmadene Centre/Bromley Mytime
Location: Cotmandene Centre, St Pauls Cray, Orpington
Duration: September - October
Target Audience: Credo Members with lived experience of mental un-wellness
RUN BY CLAUDIA FIRTH
This course was organised into six, two-hour sessions on Fridays during September and October 2010. I was unable to attend the first session due to holiday.
Session two: we went on a field trip to the Scadbury Nature Reserve. The weather was disappointingly dull and overcast, but we soon found out that taking photographs with a digital camera was easier, as we did not have the glare of the sun on the electronic screen. An optical viewfinder was a great advantage if you had one on your camera. We have a wonderful time taking lots of photos of the formal patio gardens, the ruins of a grand house and the remains of the Roman road; also wonderful vistas, landscapes, trees and foliage. I was keen to download my photos so I transferred them to a CD from the memory card at Boots that afternoon.
Session three: we took photos of objects and ceramics we had taken to the centre. This was hampered by the lights as it was very bright indoors under the artificial lighting. So we found ways ot take photos that did not require the flash and put the objects on a dark background.
Session four: we used the Internet and went into Google Picasa, a software program that had been downloaded onto the laptop computers.
The last two sessions were spent editing and adjusting our work and also learning how to burn (copy) to CD the photos we wanted to keep. By the end of the last session we just had time to print off colour photographs onto glossy paper. Claudia and Jan gave us all a certificate and also took a group photo of us all. We could import the photos we had taken on the previous sessions by plugging in a USB cable from the camera to the laptop or, in my case, using a universal card reader, as the CD I had could not run on this laptop at the Centre. Once downloaded, we could choose our favourite photos by clicking on them and sending them to the printer for a printed contact sheet of thumbnail images.
I am looking forward to seeing all the finished photographs when Claudia has compiled them and also using some of the skills we have learned, when I buy a better camera. Claudia gave us a printed sheet of information at each session that we put into our folders along with our completed photographs, as a good reference for the future.
I enjoyed the course very much.
Report by Credo Member: Frankie
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