Month: January 2008

Creativity In The Classroom

Post author By Claire
Post date January 31, 2008
5 Comments on Creativity In The Classroom

Canon 10D 85mm, f2.5, 1/180, ISO 200

First of all, I want to thank you all for your comments on my last post. It was a real boost for me to read them all and I know how difficult it is to know what to say when someone tells you they’ve lost a loved one so thanks for taking the time to let me know you care.

Now, I mentioned a couple of days ago about the group Creativity in the Classroom and how I had spent an afternoon photographing one of their workshops in a Dublin school. Well, it was so much fun for me, and I have been happily processing the photographs and wanted to share some of my favourites. So today and tomorrow I’ll put a few up here and you can check out some more, if you like, on Flickr.

Canon 10D 28mm, f1.8, 1/125, ISO 200

The sun flare in the photo above came in very useful with making the pupils less recognisable.

Some of the children’s artwork:

Canon 10D 85mm, f2.8, 1/125, ISO 200

Canon 10D 28mm, f1.8, 1/250, ISO 200

Finally, the long lists for the Irish Blog Awards have been slowly leaking out over the past few days. I’m really chuffed to see that Gingerpixel has been nominated in Best Photoblog and Best Blog! Thanks to whoever nominated me for that one, I’m extremely flattered. Check out the other nominees, the standard this year is excellent.

Personal

See You Later DaDa

My DaDa passed away last night. He’d been in hospital since just after Christmas so we all knew it was coming but, looking at this photograph and knowing the mischief that’s in those eyes, I still find it all a little difficult to take in. I don’t really know what else to say, but his photographs were so well received when I posted them here and on Damien’s blog I just felt like I should tell you all.

Photography

Paintbrushes

Canon 10D 28mm, f1.8, 1/250, ISO 200

I had a photography session in a school in Dublin yesterday where my assignment was to capture and document the work of a group called Creativity In The Classroom. They go into schools and give the pupils the opportunity to work with actual artists. The atmosphere was wonderful, the school was an old Catholic school with all the old features so I was in photo heaven. There is a rule now in a lot of schools that photographs cannot be taken where the children are recognisable so this gave me a bit of a challenge when trying to capture their work (portraits without faces!). Still there were plenty of colourful images everywhere I looked. I haven’t processed them yet, except this one which I spotted while downloading the files.

Photography Portrait A Day

#18: Carlene

Canon 10D 85mm, f2.8, 1/350, ISO 200

This is the very beautiful Carlene, she and I are members of the same church so I took this portrait this afternoon after the service while everyone else was having tea.

Ireland

Two Tits And A Vote

First off you should go read this blog to get a first hand account of what a woman in Ireland is up against if she discovers a lump or needs to have something as simple as a breast ultrasound. Go to this page, scroll to the bottom and read your way up through the posts. It’s frustrating and terrifying and you may just finish it wondering what on earth can be done.

Well, Sabrina, a blogger who has impressed me so much of late with her graphics and hilarious blog that I can’t wait to meet her at the Ladies Tea Party, has stepped up and launched twotitsandavote.com (brilliant name!). In Sabrina’s words:

Two Tits and a Vote is a political action campaign, designed to get women to use their muscle as voters to take action around a single issue at a time. Men are very welcome to take part; the platform is merely aimed at mobilising women.

Itâ€™s built around the concept of â€œarmchair activism.â€ Armchair activism enjoys reasonable take-up online, but is often decried as ultimately being rather useless because it rarely translates into the real world. I started to think a lot about how to merge all of the good stuff about armchair activism – itâ€™s fast, itâ€™s accessible, itâ€™s not a big ask, and it delivers a feel-good factor to the participant – with actions that could actually take form in the real world.

So go sign up, send a postcard, write a letter, add your name to the petition. It’s already generating a fair amount of press and radio coverage so spread the word.