Day 7- Macro Part 1

Hurray! The girls did a wonderful job on this assignment. Much, much better than the previous assignment. I had a ton of photos from all sorts of different angles. The main assignment was a regular photo and low angle photo of the same thing. For the girls, the optional part was the same thing except with an animal. This was optional because of the cultural challenges for girls to be able to go out taking pictures in public. Somehow it got turned into 3 photos, one regular, one high, and one low. This was fine with me, it gives them even more practice and examples to look at and learn from, probably should've made that the original assignment anyway.

Every single one of the girls went out and took a good amount of photos, all of them completing the assignment, big improvement from a few girls taking one portrait photo. Not all of the pictures were the best pictures, but as I explained to them, I don't care. They'll learn to start taking better and better pictures the more that they practice, and as long as they're going out and not just completing the assignments, but doing even more, then they're going to get the practice that they need.

What made me even more excited, is the number of girls that actually took animal pictures! I had girls taking pictures of spiders or lizards, chickens in their yard, birds in the trees, whatever they could manage. My favorite was a girl who took some pictures of some fat bottomed sheep, in a road in public, in her burqa. I had some girls getting down into the dirt, getting really low to take the low angle pictures, just like I wanted. All together, I was extremely happy. The quality of the photos wasn't always the best in the world, but they've had 3 classes, I don't expect them to be pro's, at least none of them were blurry.

Maliha

Maliha

Masooda

Masooda

Suraya

Alia

Alia

Fazila

Alia

Masooda

For the rest of class, we learned how to take macro photos. Macro photos being pictures you take of really really small things, that are taken so close they basically fill the whole screen and look humongous (I'm assuming this is why they are called macro instead of micro, since they are generally small objects after all...). We also went over the major difference between a macro photo and zooming in really close from a distance. This assignment will be a lot easier for the girls in particular to complete. They need to come back with 4 photos again, this time, a regular photo of a flower, a macro photo of a flower, a regular photo of an item of food, and a macro photo of that same item of food.

Since all of these can be taken inside/ within a given compound, none of the girls seemed too worried about this weeks assignment. It'll be interesting to see how these ones turn out, I'm hoping they don't just shove the camera in close and press the button coming up with a blurry blob of nothingness because they're too close to focus on anything. I don't think this'll happen though, if things go like the last assignment, I'll be extremely happy. Added bonus, we'll all get to see what real Afghan food looks like extremely close up!

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