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Past SPE Annual Conferences

Northwest Chapter Conference Schedule

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Imagemaker: Daniel George

Saturday, September 22 - 11:00AM to 11:30AM

"To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin." bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom



For incoming freshman interested in pursuing commercial photography as a career choice, the First Year Freshman Seminar class, Outdoor Photography, acclimates students to the rigors of the academic life on the Northwest College campus while simultaneously treating them to the visual delights of the natural landscape that surrounds them. The eight-week class consists of evening lectures filled with information on how to photograph moving water as well as not to be attack by Bison or Grizzly bears. The course culminating with an intensive weekend excursion into the Beartooth Mountains via the Sunlight Basin and on into Yellowstone National Park.  While on this immersive field studies trip, students explore the photographic concepts of aesthetics, lighting, and composition while tackling the technical aspects of capturing landscapes and wildlife with telephoto lenses and tripods set upon uneven rocky surfaces. Photographic assignments include creating representations of Humans and Land, Water, Light or Shadow, Trees, and a Strong Graphic. Embedded within these assignments comes the intrinsic questioning that human occupation has upon the landscape, both visually and economically.




For the past twenty-eight years, within the confines of one of the most conservative states in the nation, the Photographic Communications program at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming has offered this course as a way to not only introduce novice photographers to the intricacies of f-stops, shutter-speeds and ISO conversions, but also to foster critical thinking about the land, how it's used by both humans and the animals that depend on it.  Photographing in the wilderness helps set up a dialogue for the Media Photography class the following semester where discussions regarding the conflicts that underpin tensions between conservation of public lands and the ongoing extraction of coal, oil and gas play out in the form of magazine layouts and short video PSAs.



This presentation offers a guideline for educators interested in situating, or refining, an outdoor photography field-studies course within their own curriculum. Information will be shared on how the course is structured--5 sections, 10-12 students in each section, taught by a team of four to five full and part-time faculty). Institutional support from the administration, commercial/corporate partnerships with Roberts Camera, PhotoVideoEDU, Tamron Lenses and the National Park Serves have become essential to the sustainability of the class thought-out the years.

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