To Be A Teacher You Must Also Be a Student

A few months ago I was asked to teach a Learning Lab on iPhone Photography for my Women's Club. It has been a lot of fun preparing for this class. While I have been using my phone for a camera ever since I got my first iPhone, I didn't seriously use it until I was in the midst of my photography apprenticeship. Quite a few of those images iPhone images even made it into my final project music video. Since then I have continued to learn and practice many different forms of iPhone photography, most recently with on-line webinars with Charles Needle and several others offered by Hunt's Photo. For the class I am teaching tomorrow I thought it was important to learn more about my students' experience and learning level and develop this class based on that. I found that most of them are taking point and click images, they know little or nothing about third party camera apps, and do only basic editing, if at all. So I decided that this class needed to start with the basics of the phone's camera app: looking at and understanding the settings and then the app itself before moving into the basics of composition, focus, exposure, taking time exposures, and using burst mode for action shots, followed with basic editing. These were things that I already know and understand. Last fall I upgraded my iPhone from a 6plus to a 12pro, quite a jump forward. I will admit that when I got it I did not take too much time deep diving into what my new phone would do that my old one couldn't. Preparing to teach tomorrow's class I have felt the need to do that. I have had to become a student before I could possibly teach what I hope will be a worth-while class. The process has been a lot of fun, and I have learned a lot. Today's image is definitely not a prize winner, but it is a good example of one of the things I learned about editing images taken in portrait mode. I have never used that mode much because I don't take many pictures of people. But I found that the editing possibilities in this mode are really fun and, even dramatic and definitely not limited to people. Additionally, because I seldom edit my iPhone pictures on the phone, I didn't know too much about doing it in the app itself. Now I do, and I am impressed. I have taught lots of different classes over the years, and have always found that when I take on a teaching challenge, I end up learning even more myself. Preparing for this class is no exception.