Read this first...

1. Read the Semester 1 or 2 outlines, I don't have clever lesson names. What you read in the course outline is pretty close to what you're doing in the lesson. The lesson title corresponds to the folders in Google Drive. Navigate the folders, presentations, and resources and download or copy what you want to use. Its all free, just give me credit, and if you're feeling generous throw me a tip on paypal.

2. Keep in mind that some of the animated GIFs will not play unless you download the file and open it in PowerPoint. Sometimes practice photos and teacher example files are provided, I also write the tutorials from scratch and this years tutorials do not match the lesson content. This year we taught fully remote until April 16th so the lessons are not battle tested and I did not have time to rewrite tutorials, only PowerPoints.

3. Some lessons have videos I have made contained within that can be found here on my YouTube channel, most now have a mix of videos I've found on YouTube and ones I've made from scratch. Everything except maybe Double Exposure has stayed the same. I have now changed almost every Photoshop process to be shorter and more scaffolded. You can still refer students to my videos and tutorials, but the PowerPoint contains the abbreviated and correct instructions.

4. My photography program has DSLR's of varying types, a full computer lab with Adobe CC 2018, students save Lightroom catalogs to synced OneDrive accounts, we are an Office 365 school, and I have some static lights, a green screen, backdrops, tripods, reflectors, but no other equipment or fancy lenses for the 20-21 year. We now have some prime lenses and more cameras.

5. During the pandemic we were fortunate that every student got a Microsoft Surface with Adobe Photoshop on it, but I did develop a cell phone curriculum to alleviate the complexity of teaching and using Lightroom and Photoshop on inferior hardware.

6. My curriculum is digital photography focused, with an emphasis on fine art photography fundamentals and photo-manipulation. There is some writing in the Portraits unit, but we barely touch on writing meaningful artist statements or bodies of work until Photo 2. The main goal of this curriculum is breaking down the technical aspects of editing and taking photos into bite sized chunks that scaffold appropriately for my population. Take a look at each project in order and you could combine them depending on your needs. Each photoshop project is three steps, practice, shoot, and then photoshop. I've found my kids can't handle following through with any step of the process unless their hand is held, they do a better job executing complex multi-step projects when each step is a distinct assignment to hand in.

7. My class periods are 54 minutes a piece, I have students listen to a short lecture, look at examples both professional and student, demonstrate a skill or walk students through a process step by step. Then the rest of the time is for the to repeat and iterate on that fundamental skill or finish editing. Some days are studio days where they have time to take photos, this can be a few days or a week depending on your students motivation level.

8. Students hand in work via Microsoft Teams via a link to a OneDrive folder. Students usually form small groups to complete shoots.

9. If you have questions, message me in Microsoft Teams or email jturek @ smcjuhsd [dot] org