Visiting famous landmarks

Year 10 photography students attended the Portrait Gallery

We were able to complete a self-guided tour ‘Headhunt’ which is a newly completed self-guided interactive program for students where they use an iPad to tour the galleries and look at some of the artworks and complete some analysis of certain works in groups. Students were asked to take photographs, record audio and written responses to prompts and questions about the artworks.

Excellent aspects of the program included a teacher’s iPad which allows teachers to see where groups were in the galleries, how many of the tasks they had completed and communicate with each group.

Students provided the Gallery with some insightful feedback on the program and had a good time exploring the artworks.

Students are currently working on a self-portrait so this visit was used to build their visual literacy and to see what is possible and constitutes a ‘portrait’.

Year 9 photography went to MOAD

Year 9 students are new to this class, so their aim was to practice producing imagery with the correct exposure.

Students had been practicing around the school shooting on M, AV, TV and fully auto modes and this excursion was a chance to put that practice into a real-world situation.

Although it was a Photography class, we explored the history of the place and what had happened there in the past. Students were quite engaged asking questions such as ‘What are they (the Tent Embassy) protesting about/for?’ and were quite surprised with the male-only toilets that had to be changed to facilitate the first female politicians (whose statues we photographed as well—Dame Dorothy Tangney and Dame Enid Lyons.)

The rose gardens are always a popular spot for photographs, capturing a bee in a flower collecting pollen was a good challenge for their newly acquired photography skills!