... using a digital camera
An idea for Art teachers
As a teacher, your classes do lots of great art projects that disappear when the project is over. Wouldn't it be nice to keep a record of all the creative, wonderful things your students do with clay, paint, pencil, or construction paper?

When you introduce a topic to your art class, wouldn't it be nice if you had some examples to illustrate what the project is all about?

Wouldn't it be nice to easily be able to present a slide show of all the art project results from your classes, to students or other teachers, at no cost to you?


The means for accomplishing this is, of course, to take pictures of the artwork that you can keep on file. In particular, the use of a digital camera means that you no longer have the expenses of buying and developing film, and so there is no limit to the number of photos you can take. But it gets better! Computers are ideal for collecting, categorizing, and labelling your pictures, making it very simple to pull them up whenever you want to show them.

First, rename each and every photo with a name that makes sense to you.
For example ... 'art10pic1_99', 'art10pic2_99', etc.
Next, make a folder for your pictures on your computer, and within that folder, create subfolders according to whatever scheme you choose to categorize the photos by. You might make folders for grade 5, 6, and 7 Art. Or perhaps folders grouping the photos by medium ... pencil sketches, modelling clay, and oil paintings.

There are several ways you can display these archived photos, depending on your audience.
  1. You can print the pictures on paper.
    This may involve a little expense if you want high quality results ... photo paper can cost 20 cents a sheet. Don't bother with this if you're going to photocopy the pages, though, since the photocopier will not reproduce pictures very well.
  2. A more entertaining method is to run a slideshow on your computer screen of all the photos you have stored.
    This can be done on a single computer, or for a whole classroom full of computers. You can even run the slide show and project it to an audience using a projector designed to project computer screen images.
Running a Slide Show:
To do this, you will need a special program on your computer. The program ideally should also let you adjust the photos that come off the camera, for brightness, contrast, and sharpness, ... and let you crop out unwanted parts.
We have just such a program, free for you to download. It's called 'Irfanview', and is totally freeware; you can install it wherever you want, on as many computers as you want!


The Irfanview main window

It's simple to use; just choose 'slideshow' and browse to the folder where your pictures are, and it will run them for you, on a blank screen (the program widow disappears), one after the other, without your input! We've used it successfully to display photos and information, and it works great!


DOWNLOAD IRFANVIEW HERE.

The program requires no installation; after unzipping, just put it in a folder somewhere and make a shortcut to it.

That's all there is to it! You can keep photos of all your artwork, from all your classes, for as long as you want.
You are making your own data base. The key is in the way you store them; if you set up an orderly set of folders that categorizes the photos the way you want, you'll always have them easily available for whatever purpose you have in mind!

Art Page | Social Studies & the Arts | Worsley School

Content & Design by Bill Willis 1999
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