Photography workshops and fundraising ideas

Today was the first day of formal photography workshops, and it was so much fun!  The boys that I'm targeting are only available in the mornings, and its particularly difficult to get up to the other site because of safety issues.  The fact that I carry around thousands of dollars in camera equipment doesn't help my case.  Nonetheless we made it up to the center, and were able to sit down with the boys and explain the project.  They all seemed pretty interested and excited to start participating.  I went over the basics of aperture, shutter speed, focus, and depth of field in very general terms, and sent them off for thirty minutes of getting to know the cameras.  At the end of thirty minutes I sat down with each boy and we looked through the photos.  The main issues were focus, and shutter speed in different lighting situations, but those are things that they will learn with more knowledge and practice.  Photography isn't as easy as many seem to think, but these boys are already showing raw talent with their vision for their photos.

Several boys are super selective about what they snap the shutter for, while others snap more.  Many of them already have a natural aptitude for composition and really see things in balanced and interesting composition.  The subject matter may be things that they see daily, but they are sharing it in a way I haven't seen before.  Even just after today one of the boy's photos almost moved me to tears as I felt I was feeling a piece of him in these photos.  Granted its a boy I already know extremely well, and its true that maybe he wasn't aware of the emotion that he was capturing in the frame, but still.  I know that I want to teach these boys more about photography, but at the same time I want to be really careful not to touch their individual styles beyond the way that knowledge will shape it.  I don't want knowledge to stifle their creativity. 

Tomorrow I'm planning to have a meeting with the Dutch man who spends more than half the year in Progreso.  We have a lot to talk about, and I'm nervous because I'm not sure I have my ideas as organized as he does.  I'm sure it won't be as formal as it could be, but I'm looking forward to taking the time to really figure out how to make myself most useful and how to best take advantage of the time that I have here.  I am going to write a list tomorrow of all the things I need to get done before I leave, and hopefully that will help me to make sure that it happens. 

The following is a series of shots from one particular boy during the workshop this morning.