Category: Art

(This is my twelfth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

There’s a guest “Opinion” post by Oz Alon over on PetaPixel that talks about how photographers are doing less specialization in order to make a living as photographers.

Now Oz Alon is a CEO if a business management platform so I’m looking at this article as more of an ad than a photo news story, but the idea that it’s hard to make ends meet by just doing wedding photography is not too much of a stretch for me.

I’ve been teaching at a K-8 arts academy for almost 20 years, now. When I started, I just taught elective classes. There was barely any photography, no videography to speak of (On 32 bit computers? Surely, you jest!), and the initial job description that I was told to go beyond only mentioned Microsoft Office products as my content area.

There were students making videos, but that was the purview of the TV Production teacher.

Move forward a couple years and budget cuts hit hard. I remember furloughs. It wasn’t a good time. In the shake-up, the TV Production department (our art department with the lowest enrollment) was cut and I inherited those students.

I started out trying to copy what they’d been doing. I had some experience with video at that point (I’d been posting videos here for a few years by then) and I’d been teaching storyboards for years in my previous visual art classes.

All videos, all the time. If it wasn’t a video, it was a plan for a video or critiques of student videos.

It was extremely limiting, but it’s what I thought was expected.

Here’s the thing, though: My class was never called “TV Production.” That program was gone. Mine was brand new. I could have done whatever I wanted, provided I found state or national standards that backed me up.

Eventually I branched out in bits and pieces. Students dipped their toes in music production using GarageBand, since we had a MacBook cart we could use.

We started taking more photos.

We made animations.

We made podcasts.

Minecraft came along and I started letting students create “adventure maps” so long as they scripted the challenges and recorded themselves completing them. I had them doing game design and it was wonderful.

Eventually the remaining TV Production departments in my district were rolled into a new department, Digital Media Arts, with its own state standards and everything. You know what? Those standards matched what I was doing with my more diverse lessons.

You know what most teachers did?

Video production, and nothing else.

You know why? You may want to make sure you’re sitting for this one:

“We’ve always done it this way.”

Inertia’s a heck of a thing.

There’s efforts to change this. On the district level my department still has its annual film festival, but now we also have a festival for podcasting and photography. We’re encouraged to branch out to those areas as well, and given sample lessons to help us step out of our comfort zones.

(Most of the high school photos come from the vis art students, though, because photography “has always been” visual arts and, again, inertia.)

But as slow as they may seem, changes are happening. Tomorrow, before I give my own song and dance to new teachers about things they can do, another awesome colleague will be talking to them about photography.

We’re not just TV Production any more. Haven’t been, for as long as my students have been breathing.

It’s good to see other people agree.

(This is my eleventh post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

There’s a guide by Pye Jirsa on headshot photography over on SLR Lounge. As someone who doesn’t do a lot of portrait photography, it’s a good read.

What strikes me is how different this is to what we experience with school photos.

School Photo day is a mass disruption to the school schedule. The photographers have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time and teachers just accept that maybe we’re not going to get our lesson done for every class we see.

I’ve got the steps down for school photos. Sit on the stool. Place your feet on the marker (this turns you to the side for a 3/4 view), if you’re wearing glasses, tilt your head down so there isn’t a glare.

You can ask for a retake but it’ll look the same as the first one.

If you’ve read through the SLR Lounge article, you may have noticed a lot of things have been left out. Perhaps the contracted photographers would care about that if they weren’t photographing 500+ students and their teachers, but they just don’t have the time.

The article even includes advice for having an actual conversation with the subject. That’s not happening when photos are being taken on the stage in the cafeteria during one of the lunches, I assure you.

If you have the idea that school photos don’t turn out nearly as well as professional headshots, well, you’re darned right. For all of the expertise of the school photographers, they’re not given the time or environment to output the same quality.

Switch over to what I do in my classroom. Students learn by doing, as any art teacher will tell you. Early on in my digital media arts position, I decided that meant more assignments would equal more learning.

In some ways, it did. Student had a homework assignment video due every week, and every two weeks they had a more intense project video due. It was a lot of work, and the ones who managed it learned to streamline their workflows to get things done on time.

Many corners were cut, but what we didn’t understand was that those corners were load-bearing. An unscripted, unplanned video by an 11 year old is exactly as high-quality as you think it is, because they don’t have the 10,000 hours needed to do that without a script.

I’ve been doing this for a bit longer, now, and I’ve learned to know better. Students still have a project due roughly every two weeks, but it might not be a video. There’s no homework that’s labeled as such, though they may still work outside of class.

The learning is still happening. There’s actually more learning taking place, because those corners that were being cut were load bearing, but they didn’t have the time.

The quality of the work has also predictably improved, and they’re getting more awards for their efforts to prove it.

There’s still the complaint that they have too much work, but these are 10-13 year old kids. If I asked for one video a month I’d get the same complaint. (In fact, this has happened.)

I think about this when I read news stories about companies giving employees more work to improve productivity. I’m not sure it’s understood that if you scrap your quality, what you’re producing isn’t worth selling.

As I said, the corners that get cut are sometimes load-bearing.

(This is my seventh post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

You may have noticed that each of my Blaugust posts is hung on a hook that is another article (sometimes several), sometimes only loosely related to my topic.

I’m liking the idea of using these as jumping off points, and the whole thing feels far less derivative than the “articles” I’ve frequently found in the past that were “Here’s a video with a paragraph about it that hits word count but really just watch the video.”

There’s a purpose for those, but I want to distance myself from them.

The Setup

With that in mind, PetaPixel has a story on The National Gallery of Art announcing an exhibit “that will trace African American photographers and portrait subjects from the earliest days of photography.”

I like how this got through the draconian policies of our current administration, as acknowledging that any non-white, cishet male existed and sometimes had problems in the 1800s is grounds for content warning signs placed outside your museum these days. (I’m looking forward to the days when people look at that last sentence with disbelief.)

The Tie-In

So here’s the thing: Most of my students are African American. I’m not looking up the numbers for this, but it’s like 95+% of them. It’s so prevalent that in spite of my own heritage being a mix of Irish/Scottish/German one of my students found out only last year that I’m not black. They just assumed everyone in the building was, because everyone in their class was.

(In their defense, they have a sibling who is very light skinned, so they thought I was like their sibling.)

So yeah, I have a student population where, when they see most pop culture media, people who look like them are regulated to the “token black friend” casting role.

Having a whole exhibit that tells them “No, people who look like you have been using cameras for almost as long as they’ve existed” is a powerful thing.

My Students’ Work

One of the things I love about my content area (by that I mean Digital Media Arts) is that it has a district-wide theme of amplifying student voices. I didn’t come up with that, but I feel like it was pulled subconsciously from my brain and put into the official documentation.

I teach in an arts school, where we have multiple disciplines to showcase: Visual Arts (of course…), Dance, Theater, Chorus, I could go on.

But the one I teach? Media Arts? It’s how the others get shown off outside of a school gym.

There’s a hazard to this, though.

Artists usually want only their best work to be seen by others. Artists are also usually their own worst critics. This does not lead to a healthy combination. I’ve students who will avoid handing work in because late assignments don’t get seen and critiqued by their peers.

(They also really hurt grades to a degree that submitting unfinished work will not, but if logic always overpowered anxiety I wouldn’t still have acrophobia.)

And then there’s the teacher involvement.

I’ve long felt that art teachers could be sorted into two categories: Those who presented student work as accurate representations of what the students were able to do, and those who wanted to showcase the best art possible.

Those aren’t the same thing. Everyone makes mistakes, but students have more to learn and therefore make more of them. I’ve seen vis art teachers gluing collages back together, going over drawings with markers to fix the linework, and other atrocities to make the student work look nicer. In the end they had work they were happy to showcase, but saying it was done by the students was not really honest any more.

The Solution?

I’ve many goals for the upcoming school year, but one of them is to provide a wider audience to my students.

Many things get easier by doing them, and showing your work to others is included in that. There’s still a need for curation (self and by others), but having my department be more visible is likely to lead to more students getting comfortable with the idea that others will see what they do.

It’s a lot of work.

I’m not sure I can manage that with all of my other duties, but I can delegate.

Among other things, I teach presentation. I can have my 8th graders work to curate student projects in ways I can share with a wider audience. As the teacher I’ll have to have the last say in what goes live (not to mention managing publicity release forms, etc.), but that’s a small portion of the effort needed.

Having my students do the initial curating removes me a bit from the process, but this is an ideal result. The goal is for STUDENT voices to be amplified. If I become that teacher with a marker to fix the line work, then I’m inserting my own voice into things.

That ruins the whole point of all of this.

Sure, as the adult in the room I need to be the last say in what goes live, but by the time I’m making that call there should be few, if any, creative decisions left.

The next hurdle is in HOW to present the work. I teach web design, but I don’t have a school-approved web host I can use for that.

Google tools are for the most part approved, but students can’t make anything in Google Sites, Docs, etc. be viewable outside of our district.

I understand and agree with these limitations. I don’t want them reversed, that opens the doors to too many headaches, but it does make things harder.

The simplest solution I see is for the 8th grader making the showcase to put the whole thing into a video and send it over to me to import to my own account and change the permission settings so a wider audience can see it. I need to check the whole video anyway, so that’s fine.

Another option would be for them to make a Google Presentation that I again copy over to my own account. Video and audio embedding can be done this way, and it’s actually how our Vis Art department did their art showcases back during our distance learning years.

The issue that arises is that permissions for the Google Presentation aren’t the same as the embedded media. You can see all the slides but then get an error for a video if the video has more restrictions. This is, in fact, something I learned from the aforementioned Vis Art shows.

So I have a rough semblance of the outline of a plan.

It might get changed a lot as I talk it out with the other teacher in my department as well as our school admin.

We’ll see how this goes.