I’ve been running some children’s photography workshops in conjunction with TEMA, which is The Turkish Foundation For Combating Soil Erosion, and is dedicated to preserving the Country’s woodland.
Children from Turunc School visit ‘Trees and Sky’ photograph copyright: Tuncay Çöteloğlu
Classes from local schools attend. First they visit the gallery and look at the large images that Michael and I made near his home in Italy, and mine here in Turkey.
Then we talk about them.
The children are quick to pick up that the pictures are different from the ones their parents take because the pictures in their family albums are mainly of people.
They like the images in the gallery which they think of as ‘nature photographs’.
Later we conduct some simple perception experiments by focussing on our forefinger and noting that the background has become fuzzy. Some children even report that the background seems to move further away, which is an accurate description of their perception because our eyes focus in a different way to cameras.
The real task starts when the children make a simple viewfinder with their hands and fingers and begin to find subjects they may wish to photograph.
Toward the end of the workshop I help them to select a subject and we take a picture of it with my camera.
The photograph is then printed on a sheet of high quality digital photographic paper using archival quality inks. It has a wide border so all the class can sign their print.
Here are some examples of the images we made during the workshops.
Here are three of the images we made at the ‘Trees and Sky’ Children’s Workshops.