Final presentation for AHA4096 Photography for Educators

Renaissance Photoshop Project from KarenBlumberg

I try to take a course every semester at Teachers College. This is because it’s one of the best perks of being an employee of Columbia University, I like continually developing myself as a professional, and it’s fun to learn new things. This semester, I’m taking Photography for Educators with Sean Justice.

Besides taking, organizing, editing,and printing photos, we set for ourselves a few semester-long goals. I had five:

1. To fine-tune an integrated project joining conversations about Renaissance art, Art History, and media literacy. This project incorporated discussions about the history of image manipulation starting with how painted portraits were idealized versions of the subject and also how photographs were manipulated early on even before Photoshop. We also talk about ownership of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which is not under copyright, and variations of the Mona Lisa by other artists which are under copyright (and variations about copyright based on country of origin). We discuss Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster in depth to encourage students to think about ownership, fair use, copyright, licensing, and attribution. And throughout it all, we teach 6th graders how to use basic tools in Photoshop (the eraser, selection, opacity, paint, eyedropper, magic wand, etc.) to alter a Renaissance painting.

2. To share my passion (soap box) for being ethical online. Hence, I shared a slide show about how to search and cite Creative Commons-licensed media (License to Cull). Also to encourage people to look at the Terms and Conditions of websites and apps, and to consider where they put their work (is it public or less public, do you own it still or are you offering your work up freely to websites and not paying attention to how your work is being used).

3. To share my Flickr stream and think about ways to use Flickr groups to build community. I set up a group AHA4096 and had hoped to have people connect with each other and each other’s photos in a shared space.

4. To impress upon teachers the importance of gathering a portfolio of their work via a blog or website. Thus, I’m housing my slideshow at Slideshare.net, and embedding it here at the top of this post. I treat this site as a museum of my work, rather than a warehouse where I house all my stuff (like my Google Drive).

5. To learn some awesome new tips and tricks for using Photoshop. I learned how to crop, set guidelines, and format my stuff for printing. I’m a big fan of straight-out-of-camera photography. Up until now, I rarely edited or printed my photos. This class really opened up my eyes to other possibilities besides shooting and sharing on Flickr.

“Image Manipulation” slideshow used to launch our 6th grade Renaissance Photoshop project

Image Manipulation Intro from KarenBlumberg

Katelin O’Hare and I are meeting with the 6th grade Art classes this week to introduce our Renaissance Photoshop project where students locate a Renaissance painting and layer themselves into it. In the past we’ve used Dove’s Evolution of Beauty campaign video to kick-off a discussion about image manipulation. This year, I gathered examples from additional resources, news stories, and ad campaigns.

Three noted moments from the ensuing conversation:
1. When looking at examples of image manipulation in advertising and fashion magazines, one 6th grader came up with the analogy: “Photoshop is to models what steroids is to athletes.” This spawned a really interesting discussion.
2. When asked where they should start their search for images of Renaissance paintings to use for their project (before we introduced Artstor), many students called out Google! One child then piped in, “The problem with Google, is that you don’t know if the images you locate will be an authentic image or an altered one.”
3. When asked why Artstor rightfully charges for a subscription to their amazing digital repository of art, one child said it was because, “They take really big photos of paintings and then host them on their computers and let us download them. It’s like iTunes for artwork. That costs money.”

Readying for our annual Renaissance #Photoshop project

I had a great planning meeting with Katelin O’Hare (maternity leave replacement for Eleana Pellegrino) about our upcoming Renaissance Photoshop project. We are going to use a couple of specific images from particular websites to introduce a discussion of “image manipulation throughout the ages.”

Essentially, every image/portrait/painting/photograph is manipulated to some extent, as in the portrait of Abraham Lincoln (below) pairing his head with John Calhoun’s body:

Even one of the earliest daguerreotypes is of a busy urban street scene rendered almost sleepy-looking since the long exposure cancelled the pedestrian and carriage traffic save for the lone shoe-shine guy in the bottom left:

I love these composites of historical scenes blended with modern photos:

(Taken from http://www.petapixel.com/2013/04/02/photos-of-modern-day-locations-blended-with-shots-of-major-historical-events)

I also want to share the 1982 scandal of National Geographic moving the pyramids to fit in the vertical frame of their cover:

and this composite from the LA Times:

In 6th Art, starting our Renaissance Photoshop Project with Yoshiko Maruiwa.

Today, I began the annual Renaissance Photoshop Project with Yoshiko Maruiwa, my favorite 6th grade Art teacher at The School at Columbia University. As part of the 6th grade integrated study of Florence and the Renaissance in English, Social Studies, Science, Art, Music, and Wellness, Yoshiko and I team-teach this Photoshop unit where students locate a Renaissance painting and layer themselves into it as either the main character or an additional character.

Here are the directions for our 3-day unit:

1. We talk about media literacy. Today, one girl said it was like “reading pictures.” I liked that a lot. As a group, we defined media as the plural of medium and gave examples of both:

Media = how to convey or communicate information or mass communication, the news are described as “the media” and can share information using a variety of means (television, radio, internet, etc…)

Medium = how something is communicated or expressed: a drawing, painting, watercolor, television, email, texting, movies, music, commercial, song, newspaper, internet, magazine

2. We watch the Evolution video from Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.

3. We talk about how easy it is to use technology to manipulate an image and why. (Marketing!)

4. We do a brief tour of the Google Art Project. (http://googleartproject.com)

With a team of Googlers working across many product areas we are able to harness the best of Google to power the Art Project experience. Few people will ever be lucky enough to be able to visit every museum or see every work of art they’re interested in but now many more can enjoy over 30 000 works of art from sculpture to architecture and drawings and explore over 150 collections from 40 countries, all in one place.

5. We talk about Artstor and it’s subscription service which Columbia University pays for. We look at the Permitted and Prohibited uses. I remind them that it is super important to read the terms and conditions of a website so that they avoid doing anything illegal or unethical (whether intentionally or accidentally). Everything they do online public, permanent, and traceable. (http://artstor.org)

The ARTstor Digital Library is a nonprofit resource that provides more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research. Our community-built collections comprise contributions from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists’ estates.

6. Students choose a Renaissance painting from Artstor that they will manipulate. The directions for the project are here.

7. We talk about ownership of Art. Who owns the Mona Lisa? Yoshiko made a simple slideshow about variations of the Mona Lisa here. We discuss copyright and fair use and discuss Shepard Fairey’s Obama Hope painting. My lesson plan is here.