Ten Tips for Making your Photos a Curriculum Hit

from Educators' eZine

Want to impress your students? Enliven your lectures/presentations with your own digital photos. But not the run-of-the-mill 'snapshot' kind. Today's kids are too sophisticated for that! Instead learn to shoot photos like a pro. It's not at all hard. And since you're shooting digital, if you don't like the picture, just delete it and do it over.

Here are ten tips that will have your students impressed by your photography:

Zoom in to catch the details. If you see a group or a soloist playing music get in there up close to catch facial expressions and even intimate details as a musician tuning up or wiping the sweat from his face.
Follow the Rule of Thirds - positioning subjects in the left or right third of the frame. Also, photograph landscapes by framing the sky so that the horizon lies at the top third of the frame.
Take the advice of architectural designer Mies Van der Rohe, "Less is more." In other words, in a modern world, get rid of distrcting elements in the foreground or background. Keep your photos simple.
Watch your exposure. Keep your lens away from blasting white light or blanketing black.
Photograph smoke and mist. If there's smoke or mist around, snap it as it not only has an interesting look in a photography, but it also probably has an interesting scientific reason to which you can attribute it.
Get dirty. Sit or lie on the ground or shove yourself into bushes to get the best angle possible.
Be Yourself. I don't feel I'll get anything worthwhile if I photograph something that bores me. For example, SUVs are not on my photography to-shoot list as I think the world would be better without them.
Constantly be on the lookout for freaky/odd/unusual/surprising stuff. While in Shanghai, I saw some men standing on scaffolding in front of a backlit plastic sign; the light from behind silhouetted their bodies so that the image became a piece of art.
Travel to places where you can shoot what other artists have painted. I've shot great garden and flower photos at Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, which is 80 km west of Paris. You can take the train to Vernon and walk to the village of Giverny and then to the famous garden.
Be ready. Set your camera on auto-mode (sports mode if you're moving) and leave it on when you're walking around so that you can quickly shoot what hits you.