Day 32: Macro Photography

Last summer I was helping my mother clean some stuff out of her house when I came across about 4 years worth of the old National Geographic World magazine that I received when I was a kid about her age.

In about a third of those magazines they had a macro photography guessing game--nine photographs of some common item taken VERY close.

So today Maren played around with the macro setting on my little digital camera.

Unfortunately, the macro only worked at about 4 inches from the subject. Fortunately, my little camera has a feature in which you can zoom in on a smaller portion of the picture to create exactly the effect Maren was after.

She found out that focus was absolutely crucial to being able to have a chance at guessing what the object was. She also found out that she could play around with photographs that had already been taken, finding items to zoom in on and put in her guessing game.

So, here they are. I'll reveal the answers in my next post!

Day 31: Chalk Art

Today Maren decided NOT to choose an art from our jar. Instead she decided she wanted to draw with chalks. So she and her brother pulled out the paper and the chalk pastels and messed (literally, because chalk is not the cleanest medium in the world) around with color and shading and adding detail.

Simple. Fast. Self-exploration.

They drew leaves mostly. Maren, already in the Christmas Spirit, also drew a lovely Christmas wreath.

Day 30: Photography

Last Thursday, November 3rd, Maren chose photography.

Both she and my son, Ian, have been curious about photography. I was trained as a photographer in college and still have all my old SLR cameras and lenses, though I seldom use them anymore. The days of film photographer are fast coming to a close. I don't know how long we'll even be able to purchase film, let alone get that film processed. And the old days of standing for hours in the darkroom with your hands steeped in chemicals are nearly over as well. *sigh*

But we decided to pull everything out and spend an afternoon goofing around and exploring the features of film photography.

I showed them the cameras and lenses and how they work, exploring the shutter and how to adjust shutter speed, exploring the aperture of the lenses and how to adjust it, talking about what happens to the photograph when you adjust those, talking about light meter and middle gray. All those technical terms that amateur photographers need know nothing about anymore, as we snap hundreds of pictures on our digital cameras without much thought to any of those adjustments, with a simple camera that does all those adjustments for us.

But when I was learning photography, I purposefully bought a camera with NO fancy auto features. Even the light meter was a simple one. In that way, I forced myself to learn and know those adjustments and what they did. Eventually it came automatically.

We went to the store and bought some film (Fuji. Couldn't find Kodak--which I preferred.) and headed to a nice spot near our house to snap pictures.

Their assignment was to take a series of pictures exploring aperture adjustment and its effects on the photograph.

The aperture of a camera lens is a device that closes down the lens. The iris in your eye is an aperture that closes down to restrict the amount of light entering your eye. The aperture restricts the amount of light entering the camera. The smaller the number of the aperture, the larger the aperture is opened. Smaller number, greater light. The same is true of the shutter setting--the smaller the number, the greater the light. In actuality, those numbers represent fractions, and as all homeschool moms know, the larger the denominator of a fraction, the smaller the number actually is. So a shutter setting of 30 is actually a setting of 1/30th of a second, which is a much larger number than 1/250th of a second and a longer exposure, allowing in more light. The same is true for the aperture, which is an actual measurement of the diameter of the aperture opening. So an aperture of f1.4 is actually 1/1.4, slightly less than 1 inch across.

The aperture opening does some interesting things to a photograph. If the aperture is wide open (f1.4) then only thing that will be in focus is the thing the photographer focuses on and everything else in the picture will be out of focus. If the aperture is closed down to its smallest opening (aperture opening sizes can vary depending on the lens) then everything--or nearly everything--will be in focus.

Why would you want that? Because it can make for an interesting picture.

Here's a photograph that's available on the Wikipedia entry on "F-number," which is the number used to show the aperture size. F-number or F-stop.


The photo is divided diagonally in half, the upper left half showing the photograph with a narrowed aperture, the bottom right half with an opened aperture.

We have yet to get the photographs processed. I'll post some as soon as we do.

In my opinion, that's one reason why the age of film is, perhaps, better off dead. I can take a picture and view it instantly with digital. Unfortunately, my simple little everything-is-automatic digital camera doesn't have settings to manually change my aperture. I have to take what it gives me. Someday I'll have a lot of money to blow on a digital camera that WILL have manual aperture and shutter settings.

Day 29: Exploring Questions

Today Maren drew out Architecture, and we asked ourselves the question, just exactly what is architecture?

We found this short little video that explains the basics of architecture pretty well, using a cup as a reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=GffUqxftkGo

We then talked about that definition in relation to buildings. First I asked Maren to define a what a building is--a structure used by humans to cover up the different things they do. We then looked at the key components of a building--walls, roof, foundation.

Then we looked around on the internet for some pictures of some cool buildings and considered them in terms of their use and the presence of those key components, and how their architects created something marvelous using them.

We found a particularly nice collection of architectural examples on this Youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK0OVNq8DLo&feature=related

Or this fine example:

Day 28: Masterworks--Monet

Today Maren chose Masterworks.

We logged onto the website for the Art Institute of Chicago and searched under the 'Collections' tab for Claude Monet.


We could have learned in greater detail about Claude Monet's life and training, but that's for another section--Masters. Instead we just looked at his art and talked a little bit about the style of art that he painted and how his art changed through his life.

We also found out that when Monet was a teen, he liked to draw Caricatures of people--another great idea for a future JSWA.


We looked at a number of his early Caricatures and twenty or so of his paintings. We looked at how, especially as Monet got older, his paintings concentrated on the 'impression' of light, dark, and color--the very definition of the Impressionist style. How his paintings are less about subject matter than they are a recording of light. Monet painted whole series of paintings the same subject painted at different times of the day, and different times of the year, under different weather conditions, etc. We saw how his age and growing blindness had an impact on that perception, and how his painting became more and more about those ethereal effects of light, dark, and atmosphere.

Maren has good vision. I do not. I had her put my glasses on to look at some of the paintings, to show her what the landscape might have looked like to Monet.

Day 27: Cartooning

Today for drawing, we decided to explore the wonderful world of comics.

We looked at the newspaper comics and a few graphic novels to look at the wide range of possibilities in drawing comics--from the very realistic to the very simplified.

We thought about lines and shapes, we talked about using simple lines to create expression, we explored different ways to create eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, heads.

And then Maren created!

This is her original comic book character, Na-nu-Na-nu:

Day 26: Edible Architecture

Today's challenge was to create a structure using pretzel sticks and frosting.

Fortunately for Maren we not only had frosting, we had frosting with SPRINKLES!! Which made this project MUCH more exciting.

It was a quick and easy one, just a simple log cabin:

My 17-year-old son thought he'd join in today, too. His lofty aspirations, however, just weren't particularly suited to the materials:

Yes, they were yummy!