Day 16- The End Part 1

Final girls class! We didn't have time to go over all of the shadow pictures, and I've only found upon review that most of them took quite a lot, which I was happy about. The girls came up and gave me their cameras and memory cards and what not, I got all of their new pictures, then we went through all of their pictures and the girls picked out their favorites, or what they thought were the best. Then, we narrowed it down from their best to the 10 best to represent them in their portfolio's.

I'm going to meet with them one more time to give them all copies of their printed out portfolio pictures, their certificate for completing the course, and re issuing cameras and empty memory cards to those who are going to teach another girl. I've gone back through and looked at their pictures and pulled out the ones for their shadow assignment to share with everyone, as opposed to having specifically collected them in a special shadow folder that we'd already reviewed. Here are some of the best:

Shazia

Maliha

Maliha

Masooda

Masooda

Suraya

Suraya

Rona

Shahnaz

Shahnaz

Shahnaz

Shahnaz

Fazila

All Rights Reserved by photographers, 2010, for all photos. Please contact info@fablab.af for individual rights.

Day 14- GIMP 2 Part 1

Many apologies, we lost internet here for a few days and I haven't been able to update my blog. The turn out of todays class was so- so. The wind picture assignment was pretty difficult, and for the most part the pictures reflected that difficulty. There were a few good ones, but in general, not so great. Also, not all the girls turned in wind pictures. And no one turned in tree pictures....

Maliha

Shazia

Masooda

Masooda

Shahnaz

Shahnaz

Shazia

The rest of the class we went over the other areas in GIMP, adding and manipulating text, saving and exporting, and some re runs of the initial things. I gave them one last final assignment, this time shadow pictures, accompanied with an extremely exaggerated sigh of "oh nooooo" from every single girl. I told them that for the last class they were going to work with me and we were going to choose their 10 best pictures for the portfolio. I also told them that I'd write up an outline of the entire class for them to use as a guide while teaching their new students.

All Rights Reserved by photographers, 2010, for all photos. Please contact info@fablab.af for individual rights.

Day 13- GIMP Part 1

Awesome. The girls did an absolutely wonderful job on the still life photographs. Everyone had a ton of different photos of the similar thing, different backgrounds, objects in different places, different angles of the same thing, everything. I could tell they put a lot more time and effort into these ones than they did with some of the other ones where they just snapped a photo on the way to class.

This class was scheduled on the same day as one of Afghanistan's national holidays, independence from Russia or England or Rome or something like that, they've freed themselves from so many people in their past it's hard to keep track of them all. At the end of the last class, my girls told me that even though it was a holiday and school was cancelled, they still wanted to come to class and asked if I would still run the class even though it was a holiday. I said of course, but we'd have to find a way of getting a classroom. So Hameed talked with his friend who could help us get a key to a classroom, he said sure, not a problem, he'd meet us just before class started to open up the doors.

Come class time, he shows up, and asks what we needed again. A key. Oh, right, let me call someone and see if they have a key.... So 45 minutes later we have a classroom. To make things run even smoother, one of the girls started bitchin' at me because it was a holiday and all schools and classes are shut down and this is illegal for me to make them come to class. Before I could even respond the girls that spoke english started explaining she's just mad because she has somewhere else to go and can't stay the whole class and to just ignore her. They all wanted to be there.

Rona

Rona

Shahnaz

Shahnaz

Shahnaz

Shazia

Maliha

Not being in the FabLab has its challenges. Todays class was learning about uploading photos from the camera onto the computer, uploading them in GIMP, and doing basic editing, such as crop, rotate, brightness, contrast, etc. Hameed, Rahmat, and I gathered as many laptops as we could and made sure they all had the proper programs on them prior to class. We set up a temporary portable lab in class so the girls could practice editing their pictures, and seeing the different effects moving certain tabs has on photos.

As for the assignment, it was the same as the second half of the assignment I gave the first boys class. Two pictures, one of a tree, and one of a creative way of portraying wind in the photo. The next class I'll teach is another girls class, so I'll do 2 girls, then a double boys, then a single boys, final girls, final boys, double boys. Good God these holidays really mess things up...

Maliha

Maliha

Maliha

Maliha

Masooda

Suraya

Suraya

All Rights Reserved by photographers, 2010, for all photos. Please contact info@fablab.af for individual rights.

Day 11- Still Life Part 1

Now I remember why I was supposed to update every day or max 2 days, because now that I've taught two girls classes I don't really remember much about the first one. Interesting.

The school was having a seminar in the classroom we usually use, so after some phone calls we were able to get another room to teach in. Not a huge turn out on the sunset/sunrise portion, and not a single low light picture. Of the pictures that I did get, some were pretty good, others were alright, but what was really great was that of the pictures I did get, it was picture after picture after picture after picture. All sorts of different angles, heights, through the trees, on top of the compound, everything. I was excited. This is exactly what I've been looking for in the girls, taking a lot of pictures from different ways, some will turn out really bad and others will turn out unexpectedly great.

Overall, I was pretty happy. One of the pictures that I really liked was a sunset picture that the girl took that didn't even have the sun in it. This is one of those thinking outside the box type deals that I think is an important quality to have in photography.

Shazia

Masooda

Masooda

Maliha

Shahnaz

Shazia

Shazia

Shahnaz

After we reviewed the photos, we started to learn about still life photography. For this, what I wanted them to learn from it was how important it is to understand the background in pictures and the lighting. Lots of times it's hard to control these things, but you always need to be paying attention while taking the photos. In still life photography, every aspect of the photo is under your control. I want them to play around with backgrounds, objects, lighting, everything. After this they'll hopefully get a better understanding of what a difference in the pictures these things can make. Spending so much time focusing just on these elements, I'm hoping it'll help them to pay more attention when taking pictures where they can't literally go around re arranging everything to make it just right.

Shazia

Masooda

Shazia

Suraya

Shahnaz

All Rights Reserved by photographers, 2010, for all photos. Please contact info@fablab.af for individual rights.

Day 9- Understanding Exposure Part 1

Before class began, I talked with my female students about becoming teachers for the next group of girls. As I've described before, obtaining girls, finding locations and people to be allowed to openly teach a group of solely women is not so easy. After reviewing the first part of the class, and being extremely happy with the progress of the students, Amy wants me to extend my time here to teach another course of brand new students. The ultimate goal here, as with all FabLabs, is to create a course solely run by Afghans so that an international does not always need to be present. A self sufficient lab, and a self sufficient FabFi team, and a self sufficient photography class.

As my time here is restricted (another reason having a self sufficient lab is necessary) and obtaining and setting up another girls class takes time, Amy and I worked up an alternative solution. I'll start another set of guys classes immediately after I finish these courses, and the girls will each become teachers to a brand new female student. This will not require me to be here, rather the girls will meet their students a few times a week and teach them the same lessons they learned from this class. Having Hameed and Rahmat here is key, especially Hameed as his sister will be one of the new teachers. Having a female who can easily collect all the new girls pictures from their teachers, and get status updates and progress info is key. Perhaps once a week she can contact all the teachers, get the pictures and get info, and send it to me. Small details still need to be figured out, but this is the general idea.

I talked with the girls about doing this, told them to think about, how it would work and everything, and let me know within the next class or two if they think it's possible to do and/or if they would like to actually do it.We shall see how it turns out, hopefully all will be good and I'll get a majority of my girls who would like to participate. I don't want to force them to do it as part of the course, and hopefully I won't have to, hopefully they'll all have so much fun with this course that they'll want to do nothing more than to spread the knowledge amongst their fellow Afghan friends. Onto the class...

Alright, so the outcome of todays class was more or less expected. I got a million flower pictures, and the simple one regular and one macro photo of the food, if any at all. The thing that was surprising though was the amount of photos taken of fake flowers. It never even crossed my mind that given the assignment to run around taking pretty pictures of awesome flowers (Afghanistan's full of them, on trees, bushes, standing alone, everywhere, especially in Spring time) that they would stay inside and use fake flowers for the assignment. Not that this takes away from the assignment or upsets me in anyway, it was just unexpected. The day I teach a class of Afghans where everything goes exactly as expected is the day I expect the world to end. So lets view this as an extremely positive thing.

The girls continued their making me happy streak with tons of choices to choose from, and many great photos. The main problem this week with taking the macro photos is having a blurry subject, or having an enlarged subject that has not quite reached large enough to be considered "macro" (according to my own person, who is not a macro professional, but rather macro knowledgeable after reading many online articles). For the most part, when you search macro photos or get examples of macro photos, the subject takes up basically the entire picture, with very little external background, as opposed to a picture of a flower pretty close up with the some trees and bush in the background.

Of course I still tell my students that I'm really happy that they do things like this, because something I've noticed with Pashtuns (I haven't quite become acquainted with the other tribes in Afghanistan) is that they don't understand the whole learn from your mistakes business. They'll never admit they've made a mistake, which is why you often get people who speak this certain level of English, and never progress further, because they won't ever admit they aren't completely fluent. So that they're making mistakes and it's visible to all the students, I think is good. They'll never learn if they always come back with perfect photos, or I only show them the best, or always tell them it's perfect.

As expected I get tons of protest from the girls, "Oh, well, there's a better one if you go ahead."

Or, "oh, well I was doing this and that happened and this and then that and this is why it isn't perfect and then after I took it I fell and think I messed up the picture." I always laugh, and have explained many times that I want them to look at these pictures as just examples, with no relation to it, they have no idea who took it, just a random picture from the web. With that mind set, then explain to me why this is either a good or bad picture, what the photographer could have done to make it better, etc. Regardless of what the story behind why it's that way is. With that said, here are there pictures:

Fazila

Zarlashe

Zarlashe

Zarlashe

Fazila

Fazila

Shahnaz

Shahnaz

After reviewing the pictures, I went over a beginners guide to understanding exposure and how exactly picture taking works. The 3 exposure settings being the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. As this is much more advanced than where they are, I wanted them to just learn what these were, and what the effects of changing these could be. Explaining changing these settings, and what you would have to change in response to changing one, how much you should change them in what situations, etc. takes years. I'm hoping they'll get much more of this in the advanced class, but for now, I want them to be aware that these exist and how they effect the outcome of taking a picture.

As for the assignment, they have a nifty little low light feature on their cameras as well as a specific sunset/sunrise setting. I want them to take one sunset/sunrise picture, and one picture in a low light setting. Leaving the camera in auto will most likely not create the best pictures, so I want them to specifically move the wheel on the top to the appropriate settings. As I understand it, moving it to these settings will change the exposure triangles settings to create the best photos in these situations. If that isn't what these settings do for this camera, I'm not too sure why there are even other options besides auto and manual. A few more pictures:

Masooda

Maliha

Maliha

Maliha

Maliha

Masooda

Maliha

Masooda

All Rights Reserved by photographers, 2010, for all photos. Please contact info@fablab.af for individual rights.