Moomba on My Mind

Today, January 26th, is Explo Spirit Day! Dust off your lanyard, wear bright orange, and get stoked about being apart of something brilliant. I thought I’d help celebrate by posting some of my favorite photos from Explo 2010. Hopefully they warm your heart and make you think of all the great moments we had last year, and for those of you returning in 2011, all the memories yet to be made.

One of two things needs to happen as you peruse this post:

1. Vote for your favorite of my favorites, and please say why!
2. Leave an Explo memorable moment, or what it is you’re looking forward to most for Explo 2011.

I’ll start with mine, so that no one feels “nervous” about going first. My most memorable Explo moment has to be going on the weekend trip to SkyVentures. As much as I like flying, I have never, ever, ever liked the idea of jumping from an airplane. Something about hurling yourself towards the earth’s from over a mile up seems deadly. Probably because it can be if you’re not wearing a parachute, but that’s besides the point. SkyVentures is located in Nashua, NH, a decent drive from Wellesley, MA. I had all of that trip, and a stop at an actual skydiving facility, to think about what I’d experience at SkyVentures. Yes, I know I was being silly, but part of me was nervous. I always get nervous about things I don’t know. All of the kids on the bus were BEYOND excited. That made me feel more silly, so I tried to be like them (yes, you read that right, I was trying to be like an Explo kid). When we arrived at SkyVentures, the people there asked us how many people would by going in their wind tunnel. Ah, the moment of truth. Do I say, count me in? Or do I say, I’ll take pictures of everyone doing something new and exciting and stay one dimensional. I must have been feeling spontaneous, because I ended up saying, count me in. Before I could say “airborne”, I was learning the proper way to hold my arms and legs while in the wind tunnel.

The first two groups of kids took a trip into the wind tunnel and came out with giant smiles on their face (I have the pictures to prove it). It was finally my group’s turn to get blasted by a giant fan. I made sure to sit towards the end of the line. What kind of a chapperone would I be if I elbowed the kids for the first spot? Probably one with nerves of steel, a.k.a. not me at the moment. It turned out I wasn’t the only person that wanted to go last. There were two students that insisted on being more last than I wanted to be. We watched as student after student floated mid-air before our eyes while the SkyVenture instructors made hand gestures to signal different leg positions or to give a giant thumbs up when a student was exactly how they needed to be. A minute and a half later with a basic knowledge of how to fall properly, they were helped to the exit and it was another student’s chance to defy gravity.

Suddenly, I found myself next in line. As the person in front of me exited the wind tunnel, I stood up and toed the line right outside of the entrance with my arms crossed over my chest. I took a deep breath and let myself fall forward, knowing the wind catch me but still afraid I’d smack my nose onto the net below. Rather than fight and freak out and wonder what I was doing and why I was doing it, I took a cue from the kids and just relaxed and enjoyed the experience. The SkyVenture instructor gave me one signal to bend my legs a bit more, then I got the giant thumbs up. I smiled and relaxed even more. This isn’t so bad, I thought to myself.

Let me say, in case you didn’t know, that a minute and a half of being in a wind tunnel as a beginner is a long time. You can’t hear anything, you can’t really look around because you’ll topple yourself, and your movement is restricted to that one falling position. The people that had gone before me spent the minute and a half working on the proper positioning for their hands, arms, feet, and head. Once I got the big thumbs up, I made sure to keep the pose and I floated there harmlessly. I guess the SkyVentures instructors decided that my basic lesson was finished, because the instructor in the tunnel with me had the wind jacked up to a ridiculous amount and suddenly we were both swirling up and down the tunnel like it was our job (well, it is his job). It was so much fun! I quickly went from being nervous about the experience to having a WONDERFUL time. I guess the moral of my story is Explo’s gives you a bunch of opportunities to try something new, or something that may take you someplace you’d never have gone otherwise, and rather than doing what you already know, do something you don’t.

Don’t see your favorite moment photographed here? Feel free to check out the other three Explo posts I did late last year:

• Why Walk When You Can Moomba?
• Moomba All The Way
• Pocketful of Moomba

As always, enjoy! 🙂

Why Walk When You Can Moomba?

Angles

“You’re shooting vertical again.”

“Aw man, you’re right.” Click!

Having to remember to shoot only horizontal pictures all summer long was challenging. Now it’s so hardwired in me that when I go out with my camera, I have to force myself to shoot vertically. I’ve heard from fellow web photojournalists that this too shall pass. Regardless, I needed to find a way to shoot vertically without shooting vertically. Not all pictures were compatible with the “horizontal only” rule. And so, I turned my camera for moments like the one above. For a strictly horizontal shot, I would have to back up which means losing out on the details like faces. Shooting on an angle gave Explo’s website what it needed format wise and gave me the composition I wanted.

Placing your camera on an angle does have its high points and low points. Yes, it looks cool, but not if you do it all the time. There are more innovative ways to capture the big picture (see Moomba All the Way). Tilting you camera over and over again doesn’t exactly scream “creative mind”. It could very well scream “unsteady hand”. Then again, it’s about using the space around your subject more fully and putting yourself where the background and foreground will be the most interesting. When shooting photos on the same horizontal plane all summer long, this is critical.

Enjoy! 🙂

 

Moomba All the Way

At Exploration Summer School, I played a lot with forced perspective and depth of field. For an example of forced perspective, take a look at the photo above. The head of the guitar is not bigger than the head of the child, but the way the photo was taken forces us to see otherwise. There are three “grounds” in a photo: foreground, middle ground, and background. Depending on where you angle yourself you can skew the perspective so what should be the largest in the background will be dwarfed by what’s in the foreground. This technique was great for spicing up in-classroom photos. It also gave the pictures depth, drawing your eye through the space rather than leaving you at the starting line.

Depth of field deals with the pieces of the photo that are in focus and that aren’t in focus. Your f-stop will determine how much of your photo is in focus. The smaller the number the smaller the field of depth, and vice versa. When dealing with dark spaces and therefore low f-stops, I did my best to capture the faces of students and leave their surroundings out. A lot of second session had me extending the depth of field by boosting my ISO. It was great in pictures where subjects were spread out, or where their work and their faces weren’t close together.

What was frustrating was the number of focus points my Nikon d60 has: 3. It’s a sad number, especially when I went through photos later in the day and found that I had focused on the tree rather than the students around it. As long as you have the time, take more than one picture. By the end of both sessions, I had taken over 20,000 photos. That doesn’t count the pictures I deleted standing right there in the classroom that I knew weren’t going to work. And get creative. Forced perspective is interesting, makes you double take, and is fun to do.

 

Pocketful of Moomba

As you may or may not know, I spent this summer working at an academic enrichment program known as Exploration Summer Schools. Explo has three branches, the Junior program (grades 4-7), the Intermediate program (grades 8-9), and the Senior program (grades 10-12). I was the Web Photojournalist for the Intermediate program, located at Wellesley College. My responsibilities included:

• Photographing students during classes, activities, main events, and trips.
• Uploading and editing those pictures on iPhoto.
• Downloading the photos to a program known as SlideShow Pro, where captions were created to give viewers a better understanding of what was happening.
• Posting “Tweets” about what I saw in during the day, along with announcing the daily posting of the Explorer.
• Using Coda, an HTML program, to update the website on a daily basis.

During the first week of training as Web Photojournalist, I was forewarned: “The classrooms are really dark.” In all reality, some of the classrooms had worse lighting than a cave. Using a flash was dodgy since I would have spent the entire summer removing red eye, so I opted for playing with my shutter speed and f/stop. The nice thing about this was I could make it seem like a place that was poorly lit (even with the lights on) seem a bit brighter. However, it was frustrating to try and find a balance between blur and the depth of focus in a shot. By raising the ISO on my camera to 1600 and higher, I didn’t have to worry about sacrificing either of those aspects in my pictures. I did, however, have to deal with “noise”.

Wellesley Campus is beautiful, and the Explo classes were sometimes a fifteen minute walk apart. I would photograph classes based on proximity so to cut down on my commuting time. What also helped were the campus bicycles I found. Covered in pink duct tape, these bikes would make my day much easier. I could zip in and out of a class up to three times a period which meant I could catch more than one lesson to photograph. This definitely came in handy when walking in at the wrong point of a lesson (a lecture versus an activity).

Some of the spaces where I was asked to photograph weren’t exactly “typical” either. Take a look through the gallery for some insider moments!

Moomba Under Construction

So I sat down last night and rethought what I wanted from this super-post. I realized that I was so excited about sharing my summer with everyone that I forgot what my blog was all about, which was teaching what I was learning. I am in the process of revamping the 14 part mini-series (which let’s face it, fourteen parts makes it its own season) into a four part mini-series. All of the same photos will be present, just divided into different categories. Thank you for bearing with me. Be back soon!

Welcome to Explo-topia!

The reason I haven’t been posting much at all is because I have a job for the summer as a web photojournalist! Explo is an academic enrichment program for middle school students located at Wellesley College. The link connects to the website that I am photographer of. Please feel free to look through the Daily Photos and Slideshows! On the days I have off I will be photographing and posting my own travels through Boston (which I’m not too far from). Otherwise, please stay tuned here! As this is where I’ll be all summer long!