Today I was taking photos of the Lower Primary PE classes and quite a few staff photos - the teachers in their staff rooms. Apparently they already had photos taken of the staff, but the photos looked either boring or too staged, so I was asked to provide some "human" nice looking staff portraits. I was also told that generally it is really hard to get photos where the teacher is actually smiling, so when I returned with photos of teachers not only smiling, but laughing, and not all in the same pose everyone was well pleased - me included!
I was also taking photos in two classes - my brief was for photos of the teacher actually teaching, and also the teacher helping the pupils. I had a ball! The first class was 5 & 6 year olds and it was a reading class and then they had to draw pictures to represent the emotion 'sad'. The teacher had drawn a basic face on the board - an oval, with two lines for eyes and an upturned mouth. Some of the kids just copied this, some stared into space but one little boy had a full person, with shoes on, and another person next to him shooting him - complete with a gun and a heavy line for the bullets. One of the girls had the face copied from the blackboard but then she continued down with the whole person, with a lovely dress & details and shoes, and then she started to add hair and make-up. My next class (photo brief) was Kiswahili. Again I had a ball, and it was great to be involved with the class.
After lunch (more photos and great food) I was to meet with the main girl from the Marketing Department. She said she had only done a very brief outline of the photos and projects she wanted me to do .... so we started. The first project was for images for a children's book that is planned. I had the outline for the book, page by page, with the story line and then the list of photos required. They needed good photos because a team of illustrators was going to be using them to illustrate the book. Some of them were quite easy to organise, but when it came to scenes like 'children walking away in opposite directions looking back & waving, with a dog, a saddled donkey and some goats with a Masai shepherd in the background and all this set with baobab trees along a winding dirt road', I didn't know whether to get really excited or wonder if perhaps the illustration may overshadow the story rather than just illustrate it! And this was just the first project they wanted me to work on!!!
There were another 15 projects on their list - from this one Department - and so I'd like to know what their full briefing is going to be. Don't get me wrong - the idea of doing all these photos is wonderful and I'm on a steep learning curve which is great. Being out and about with a camera all day, with brief periods at my desk to download them before labelling them all and then clearing my SD card and heading out again to do more photos isn't my idea of a hard day.
At the end of the day, some of the volunteers head to the Waterhole, which is just outside the school gates. Some head to the gym, or to yoga, or Swahili classes - depending on what day it is. Meal time is generally 7pm for the volunteers - we are grouped into kitchens (hence I'm in the Bondi kitchen) and someone is rostered on to cook each evening for the group in that kitchen. So you can head up earlier to give them a hand, and then after dinner & cleaning up, everyone disperses.
As well as photographing the PE class on one of the "ovals" today, I also made sure to photograph the wall. This is the oval for the Lower Primary, and along the entire wall, each section has 2 paintings on it depicting things like the brain, male & female reproductive organs, geographic terms, parts of a computer, kidneys, flowers, human skin, the digestive system, mathematical signs and areas, the human skeleton and so on. I thought this was amazing - not only the quality of the painting, but the subjects. The kids see this every day, and even if they don't memorise each painting, they must subconsciously absorb the information. A very smart idea and I think one well worth copying!
And that was my day. Tomorrow's schedule has been completely changed. My first period is now completely free (at the moment anyway) but the rest of the day is packed. Stay tooned .... and of course I'll finish up with a few shots from today.
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