Category: Art

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Load-Bearing Corners #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(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.

Seeing (Yourself in) Your Art #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(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.

Photography For a Living #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

Over on DIY Photography, Alysa Gavilan as a good introduction to freelance photography as a career. It’s worth a read if that’s something you or someone you know is seriously thinking about that as a choice.

I’m not summarizing articles here, but I’ve known a few freelancers and photography business owners (Are you a freelancer if you have employees?) and because of that I offer some additional advice:

Get a business degree.

No, seriously. Some of the most talented artists I know don’t have formal degrees in their craft, because it’s already their passion. They live and breathe that stuff, and the knowledge follows experience and sharing with others in the communities that form around their chosen media.

A photographer might not start out strong, but they get that way through trial an error.

You know what field is prohibitively expensive if you try to learn through trial and error? Business.

A 2 year business degree from a community college will give you the basics for how to start a company, handle billing, pay employees (you should be an employee of your business, even if it’s just you), get proper permitting and paperwork, and a bunch of stuff I don’t know because I’m not a freelancer.

I’m not saying a photography degree is worthless, far from it. I would love it if every artist had the time and money to get a degree in the media that is their passion, but that’s not the world we live in right now.

If you only have the finances for one degree, get the one that helps you manage those finances.

Then use it to make your love of photography profitable.

The Last Museum: Ominous Name, Great Resource #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

The very first post I ever made on this blog was about the Artchive, a still-running site where you can find countless fine art images by famous artists. When I made that I was halfway through my first year as an elementary art teacher (after 4 years of teaching high school) and in the process of getting my graduate degree.

That post – this whole website, actually – was part of that degree, as we had to make web pages for one of my courses. Most went with static pages but not me, I had to be fancy!

The Artchive is still awesome, but Open Culture has found yet another resource to add to my tool belt: The Last Museum.

You should read the write-up Open Culture has, it’s not long and I don’t want to just rehash what someone else said. Instead, let’s talk about usage.

My students like making digital things, but those interests aren’t distributed evenly. If they have a video that needs some visuals, their first inclination is to head to Google and steal something. My job, in part, is to fix that so they don’t end up on the news for the wrong reasons.

Now I’ve shared a variety of sites with them to help out with that, but more is better, and The Last Museum is effectively a search engine for art.

One of my favorite features about it is that you can select a specific range of years. Because copyright law is a hot mess in most places (it’s great to protect artists’ rights, it’s unfortunate that companies abuse it constantly), I’m more likely to find public domain art I can use if I move the higher end of that slider down to, say, 1930.

(It’s still worth checking each work, of course, as exceptions sometimes exist depending on each country’s laws.)

And the variety! There’s maps, woodcuts, paintings, prints, lots of architecture, and all kinds of cool things in there.

This isn’t going to replace the other sources I use, but it’s certainly going to supplement them.

Put Your Phone Away, Time to Take Photos! #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

Remember when you would buy a compact camera if you wanted something inexpensive?

Well, technically you still can (Looking at you, Camp Snap!), but the prices for higher quality compact cameras are surpassing the lower end DSLR and mirrorless models, even when you factor in the lenses.

Granted, you’re getting what you pay for. A $1k+ compact is going to outperform my current, aging DSLR (in the best lighting, at least…) while still being small enough to fit in a pocket. Still, I’m the kind of person who won’t pay the going rate for a new desktop computer when I’m replacing my phone, so my knee-jerk reaction is to not like it.

The Bad Times

I remember when it seemed like the small camera market was dying off. Flip video cameras were remarkable even without an optical zoom, but cell phones were on the rise, so they died away. Reporters were being handed iPhones so staff photographers could be laid off. (And that was earlier this year!)

The Better Times

Now we’ve got a resurgence of non-phone cameras and I love it, for so many reasons. Camera companies are loving it as well, as the ones that survived are raking it in. I won’t celebrate the rich getting richer, but without new hardware being made the hobby does get a bit more difficult.

First of all: Your average non-phone camera isn’t going to be packed with AI “features.” Oh, there might be something in there labeled as AI, in the same way that every spellchecker gets that label if someone in marketing thinks it’ll make a shareholder salivate, but cameras aren’t going to have the processors or storage space dedicated to the LLMs I complain about to everyone who will listen.

Second: Phones are constantly online. Cameras aren’t. You can get a camera with Wi-Fi features, but try turning those on and watch your battery drain in real time. The benefit here is that any portal onto the internet is also a doorway to distraction. When I’m taking photos I want to be in that moment, not immediately going through the process of evaluating and uploading content.

My students have always been in that mindset. It’ll take an hour to record 5 minutes because they need to stop and review after every shot, and while that’s happening oops here come the phones. This only got quashed last year because of a school-wide cell phone ban.

A Mild Complaint

The downside of this is that it’s getting harder to get cameras for my classroom. I started regularly trolling shopgoodwill.com back in 2020 looking for computers, and within a few years I had a class set of compact cameras as well. Granted, they were of … varying levels of quality, with some using cards not manufactured in quantity since before some of my students were born, but they worked, and they were cheap, because the demand was low.

Now, I still get cameras from Goodwill, but my eyes are on the bridge models – like the Nikon Coolpix ones that take four AA batteries, because I can get rechargeable lithium AAs for cheap(ish) prices and those things combined will last for years.

But the compact cameras? That’s a non-starter. I might get a DSLR for $50 and be happy even without it being new enough to record video, but the decent compacts are going for way, way, more.

(I’m fully aware that this may be incredibly dated within a year or two. Consider it a snapshot from a bygone era if that’s the case.)

A Selfish Complaint, Because It’s My Blog So I’m Allowed

I suppose my biggest complaint about it is entirely selfish. Until last year I had a perfectly serviceable compact that was waterproof, shockproof, had a flip-out screen, and all for @ $400. You can’t get that value for that price any more, and since the screen died it’s next to unusable.

The New Old Compact

My new compact, A Camp Snap Pro, is none of the things the old one was. It’s cheap, by both definitions of the word. There’s no flip-out screen, in fact there’s no screen at all. It doesn’t do video, and while I suspect it would survive a bounce or two thanks to a lack of moving parts, I dare not consider it to be waterproof.

Not everyone’s a fan.

I’d take a class set if I could manage it.

No screen to check your shots? Well it’s more work to do that, so you might as well take all of the ones you need for this assignment before stopping your shoot to do that. You DID plan your whole shot list, right? … right?

No built-in zoom? Use your feet like I told you to.

The photos all look too dark? Time to actually use the studio lights we have instead of relying solely on the fluorescent overheads.

It’s only slightly removed from teaching film photography, but without the chemicals.

I’m totally here for that aesthetic.

Archived: Art

Reflectors & Photography

Posted on by Aaron

I love reflectors. A good one is lightweight and compacts down to a size that’s super portable.

Importantly: They’re much cheaper and more convenient than most lights that would serve the same purpose.I don’t even need to buy one, since I’ve made due with a sheet of paper and even a blank wall on occasion.

But there’s still a trick to getting it right, so I’m glad that SLR Lounge has written up a guide to Reflector use.

Archived: Art

5(ish) Photography Lesson Ideas

Posted on by Aaron

Lesson ideas:

  1. Take 100 unique shots of the same item and/or in the same location. (The first 50 or so will likely not be so good. After that, students will be forced to think.)
  2. Photograph something being made (Lego sculpture, a meal, a painting, etc.) with the camera in a different location in regards to the subject in each photo.
  3. Document an outside (not in a car) journey from the point of view of your feet. Capture as many landmarks/areas of interest as possible.
  4. Create a series of images where the subject is only seen in reflections (mirrors, windows, still water, etc.), bonus points if it is interacting or lining up with the non-reflected parts of the composition.
  5. Watch the video below for inspiration.

Getting Homework to Work, Part 2

Posted on by Aaron

Yesterday  I started documenting my efforts towards making homework enjoyable enough for my students to actually do it for a change. By the end of that post I’d set up a weekly assignment where students made a video series as if they were YouTube stars. There was a definite increase in participation and quality, but I wasn’t quite done.

Binge Watching Isn’t So Bad.

I started by taking all of the homework videos submitted over the previous week and throwing them in a folder in Google Drive. My district uses G Suite (formerly GAFE, or Google Apps For Education),  so I’m one of those lucky ducks with unlimited storage space.

In the past I’d tried tossing them all into a playlist and showing them in class on my LCD projector, but with a 1:1 ratio in my lab there was nothing stopping me from letting students watch and critique these videos at their own pace.

For convenience I also renamed all the videos following a specific naming convention. If John Doe submitted a 2 minute 11 second video for the 3rd video in his series, I named it 3_JD_2-11.mp4. This was a marked improvement over the previous names, which ranged from “My Edited Video” to “12345.mov” … I wasn’t grading students on how they named their files, so long as they uploaded the right ones.

With all the videos in a folder that I could share through Google Classroom, I was almost ready to go.

Will This Be Graded?

It doesn’t matter how enjoyable an activity you design, there will invariably be someone who asks if it’s going to show up in your grade book. I personally have an aversion to assigning “busy work”  because  I end up making myself busier as I grade something that was meant to be filler, but  there’s still that student, as dependable as death and taxes, that will ask if THIS time I’m giving them work that doesn’t matter.

Nope, it’s not enough to do things out of the goodness of your heart, you need numbers to go with it. Numbers I am happy to provide, in fact, so long as you give me a few in exchange.

I took all of the renamed videos and put them in a Google Form. I made it a “Dropdown” question, since otherwise my students would be scrolling for days.

(Pro Tip: If you don’t want to type everything in, you can’t select text in Google Drive’s web interface but you CAN  tell your browser to print the page. When the preview shows up, DON’T press the print button – the text in the preview page  can be selected, copied, and pasted into a Google Form. You’ll get some extra lines you’ll need to delete, but that’s easier than typing everything by hand.)

Then I added four “Linear Scale” questions that my students would use to rate the videos they watched. We’d already talked in class about these categories, so they were familiar with   them and didn’t need much in the way of explanation.

I capped it off with “Short Answer”  questions that allowed students to offer some criticism.

After the critique is over I  find the average for each category and then add the four categories up to get a score out of a possible twenty points. Critics get a score as well, earning one point for every three minutes of video graded.

Testing Boundaries

Of course this  has not always gone smoothly. There have been students that thought single word critiques, or pasting in the same sentence for each critique, were acceptable. One day when I was absent half the class invented time travel and managed to critique all the videos in  a tenth of the time it took to watch them.

I caught those students, because timestamps are a thing and I refused to treat this like something meant to save ME time and energy.

I’ll say that again: Letting students grade and critique student videos IS NOT faster than grading them myself.  I still have to watch the student videos  (why wouldn’t I?) and if anything I spend more time grading critiques than I did grading videos. I’m sure as I keep doing this I’ll find ways to streamline the process, but that doesn’t mean I’ll have more time for video games afterwards.

Keeping What Works

The goal was to get more students to start submitting their homework videos, and it’s working. My kids, with some exceptions, like writing comments when they know their classmates will read them. They like making movies when they know their classmates will write comments.

But what about the grades, you might ask? Won’t the students just give each other 5/5 on everything? There are a few that give incredibly high scores regardless, but with anonymous grading (on the student end – I see everything) and a class my size, it mostly averages out. Even if they did collude to give each other high marks, my homework grades are mandated by my district to count significantly less than my assessment or classwork grades.

Overall the scores are SLIGHTLY higher than what I’d give using the same rubric, but well made   videos still score higher than lower quality ones.

And they’re   getting better.

As a member of their audience, my students can take me or leave me. I’m far too old and out of touch with today’s youth for my opinion to mean much. But their peers? Those are opinions that mean something, and I’ve given my students enough training for them to point out what areas of technique need improvement.

So there you go. Your mileage may vary, but this setup seems to be working for me. All it costs is one class per week for critique and a significant portion of my planning time to organize and grade the  commentary, but the end result is students getting better at something they actually like to do.

That works for me.

Getting Homework to Work, Part 1

Posted on by Aaron

I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve been experimenting with letting kids grade student work. The whole journey will take more time to tell than I feel comfortable putting in a single blog post, so I’ve split it into parts. I’m not at a point where I’d say I have a perfect system, but then show me an educator who does.

If you don’t want something done, call it “Homework.”

It all started with my homework. All year, my Media Arts students have been tasked with creating one video per week in addition to any in-class projects I assign. I try to create assignments with enough creative freedom for students to bend them to their will.

Each homework assignment needed to be a   short (1-3 minute) video with a “hook” that they all needed to have in common. “This video should have an argument.” “I want this video to have two different settings, each designated with an establishing shot.” The goal was to give a mote of detail (frequently a cinematic technique I wanted them to practice)  around which the student could condense their  plot, making it less likely for anyone to be able to say “I couldn’t think of where to start.”

But this was still homework.

And middle school students, as I’m sure you know, have an aversion to homework.

It’s not all their fault, mind you. Teachers in most classes give a significant amount of homework every night in the name of “rigor.” Imagine, if you will, that a student has 5 classes per day, and that each class on average assigns an hour’s worth of homework per night.

I don’t know about you, but my school doesn’t finish dismissing students until after 4pm. Assuming that they live close to school (which many of my kids don’t, since it’s a magnet school), they won’t be done with their homework until 9pm, assuming they work through supper. This barely gives them any time to be kids, rather than students.

Unless they prioritize, and skip some of their homework.

I don’t think it’s that students disliked my homework. I think that they didn’t like it enough to  prioritize it over assignments from other subjects that may have been more important for their grades.

In the past I simply bypassed all of this by not assigning any homework at all, but the overall quality of student work went down as a result. My students don’t need my homework to boost their grades, they need it to boost their skill level through practice and repetition. Telling them this doesn’t always get results, because that 4 page paper for another class is worth a lot more than my work. I can’t bump up how much my homework is worth in a bizarre teacher versus teacher arms race, either (even if I wanted to), because my grading percentages are mandated on the district level.

If you want something done, make it something that would’ve been done anyway.

My first step was to play up student interests. I already knew, through conversation, surveys, the audition process, and looking over students’ shoulders when they were supposed to be working on something else, that the majority of my Media Arts majors are obsessed with YouTube.

(My class has a focus on video and is intense enough to require an audition. If they didn’t like YouTube, I’d be worried.)

At the start of 3rd Quarter, I made a change to the homework. The weekly “hooks” were gone. Instead, students had to format their remaining 18 videos as if they were all part of a YouTube channel’s series. They needed an opening segment and a theme that they would pick and keep with for the rest of the year.

Some students picked a video game theme, of course. One of them is doing DIY craft videos. Another is doing weekly challenge videos, guest starring various family members. One young lady is doing weekly book reviews.

Due to their age I did not require them to make these videos into actual YouTube channels, but several of them actually got their parents’ permission and did just that.

And you know what? It really helped. I had students who were hit and miss in regards to completing homework start handing it in every week. Overall the quality of classwork assignments went up as students began to master the video editing software of their choice.

It was working, but not well enough for my standards.

We were missing something crucial that every aspiring YouTuber craves.

An audience.

In my next post, I’ll explain how I added one.

Teaching Criticism With Spam

Posted on by Aaron

In the near future, I’m going to be sharing some spam with my students, and not for the reason you’d think I’d do it. While teaching how to tell the difference between actual important emails and unsolicited commercial and/or malicious emails is important, that won’t be the primary goal.

In addition to everything else I teach, part of my curriculum involves criticism. We as a culture of consumers frequently elevate critique itself into an art form – one so high that we generalize its practitioners into a league of toga-clad experts, giving thumbs up or down as various creative works battle it out in their arena. (The critics loved it! The critics panned it! The critics said it wouldn’t do well but look at the box office numbers, so what do they know?!)

You might think that things are different now that there are services that crowd-source ratings, and you’d be right. Rotten Tomatoes and Yelp are the first that come to mind, but Amazon’s reviews and YouTube’s Like and Dislike buttons also come in to play here.

Unfortunately, not all crowd-sourced criticisms are created equal. The goal of my upcoming lesson will be to improve how well my students articulate themselves when critiquing things they like or dislike.

The main example I intend to show will be a little gem from this very blog’s spam filter:

Seems like a nice bit of commentary. I mean, they’ve told me I have room for improvement, but they lead with something nice to say so the comment seems thoughtful and well-rounded.

What’s my point?

Guess which post they were commenting on.

This comment could more or less be attached to any of my posts where I explain something and still have it mostly make sense in context. There’s nothing in here to show that the person who wrote it actually read anything on my blog other than the tag line, and that we can only guess because their name and web address (which I censored since I’m not giving their college loan site free advertising) have something to do with education. OK, it was probably a bot that posted, but technically the bot still reads key words.

This is a common attribute for spam, but this is not something I expect from students.

I’ve recently ramped up the amount of time spent doing peer critiques in my Media Arts classes. The main setup is the subject of a blog post for another day, but one of the hurdles we have to navigate involves generic criticism.

It’s all well and good to say that you liked a video. It’s also OK if you say you didn’t like it, since not everyone has the same tastes.

But neither of those opinions works well in a critique setting if you don’t say WHY. The more my students dig down into their reasoning, the less likely they are to give criticism that would get caught in a spam filter.

That’s the goal, anyway.

We’ll see how well it works.