Tag Archives: high school photography

Photography, Printables, Resources

End of the school year activities – photo scavenger hunt

Hurry up and wait — that pretty much sums up the feeling of the last few weeks of the school year. There are so many things that need to be accomplished, but there is also a lot of downtime as students are finishing up final projects and studying for exams. It’s both relaxing and stressful, and I inevitably end up needing some end of the school year activities for students to do while I am finalizing grades. Luckily, I found a fun way for students to stay engaged in our photography material, and have some fun — a photo scavenger hunt!

I created a scavenger hunt that includes photos that test my students’ DSLR knowledge, as well as compositional skill. I also threw in a bunch of fun and unusual types of subject matter so that students would find it challenging to complete all of the photos.

Photography students challenge with a photography scavenger hunt.
Photography students can test their knowledge in a fun end-of-the-year activity by completing this photography scavenger hunt.

The best way I’ve found to assign the challenge is to have interested students team up. The members of each team of students can all add photos to one list. Once the team feels like they completed the most of the items, I can check their photos with them and then mark down the number that they completed. The team with the most items completed gets a prize (usually candy).

My students have always seemed to enjoy this activity and it still reinforces many of the skills and concepts we learned throughout the year. You could take this idea and adapt it to fit with other art classes or other subjects as well.

This scavenger hunt tests students’ knowledge of their cameras, photo lighting, and compositional techniques, as well as offering them a fun end-of-the-year activity.

The great thing about assignments like this is that students have to work together to figure out what some of these terms mean and how to capture them in a photo. It also makes the students have to apply what they learned during the year, helping to solidify the concepts in their minds.

If you teach a photography class, feel free to download a printable .pdf of my scavenger hunt list below. Enjoy, and here’s to the end of another school year!

photo scavenger huntDownload
Photography, Photoshop

Isolated Color Photography

Giving a nod to Gestalt theory, my beginning photography students manipulated some of their photos to create anomalies of isolated color.

They learned that you can create a focal point (a point of visual interest) by highlighting an area of difference in the image (in Gestalt theory, this is called an anomaly). There are many ways to do this, but in this instance, we highlighted these areas by keeping them in color and desaturating the rest of the photo. It was a simple process, but the resulting photos are fun, and the students learned one more way of making their photos compositionally effective.

*All artwork generated by the following students, grades 10-12 [Katelyn C.] [Maja N.] [Justin R.]

Isolated color photography assignment in high school photography.
This student used a wide aperture to create a bokeh effect in the background, creating added texture in her photo.
Beginning photography assignment, creating a focal point of color.
This photo was taken by a foreign exchange student, hence the London scene.

This is a great mini-lesson for beginning photography students because it got them thinking a bit more about composition, but it is still a simple enough concept to quickly grasp. That said, they do have to put more effort into their photo planning before starting this project. For instance, they not only have to decide what would be the best focal point and overall composition, but they have to envision how the pop of color will impact and possibly change the visual movement in their image. It’s an added element that helps students to realize the importance of planning in the photographic process.

Students tend to have a high success rate with this project because the process in Photoshop is easy to master. It’s also a great way to give new photography students extra practice with the basics of shooting in manual mode and metering, while still producing a new style of photograph.

 You can learn how to make your own isolated color photo in the video tutorial below.

High school photography lesson about composition.
As you can see, this student had a great photography model at home.