In the Fall of 2007, I took my second class in the Educational Technology Master’s Program at APU.  I started this class very excited about what I would learn.  I have a digital camera at home and last school year, I wrote and received a grant so I could purchase a digital camera for my classroom.  I was excited to learn more about digital photography and how I could use these skills in my kindergarten classroom. I didn’t know what to expect as the class started and found the time I spent learning to use Adobe Photoshop to be both interesting and challenging.  In this class, I learned how to post photos to Flickr,  make three dimensional photos, combine photos to make a panorama shot, and make a poster for my classroom.   

Two of my favorite projects were creating an imaginary person and “photoshopping” myself into a stock photo.  For the previous assignment, I chose photos of five of my kindergarten students I had taken the first day of kindergarten and took elements from each child to make one imaginary person.  It was fun showing the finished product to my kindergarten students.  The latter project was a favorite because it involved creativity.  I had to look at a series of stock photos and find one that I would add my self to the photo.  The challenge was making the photo look real.  I chose two polynesian men at the edge of a pit where they had prepared a pig. I put my camera on the tripod, put on my hawaiian-print shirt, took my picture and inserted it between the two men.  I didn’t end up with a photo that looked completely real, but I had fun with the project. 

One of the major projects in the class was restoring a photo.  I dug through some old family photos and found a picture-postcard of my grandfather who had passed away before I was born.  The postcard had gotten ripped in half just above my grandpa’s eyebrows.  When I found the card, the top half was missing.  I thought restoring this photo would be difficult, but not impossible.  Since the family resemblance is so strong on my mother’s side of the family, I decided to take a picture I had of my brother and “photoshop” the top of my brother’s head onto my grandfather’s photo.  Combining the two photos was the easy part of the assignment.  Once this was done, I had to get the added part of the photo to match the colors of the original photo.  I also had to use the clone and eraser tools to get the skin tone of the forehead to match that of the rest of my grandfather’s face.  The end result was a great photo.  When I showed it to my mom, to my surprise, she commented that it didn’t really look like her father.  I was disappointed, but was still proud of the work I had done to restore the photo.  A few days later when my mom and I were talking, she mentioned that the reason the photo didn’t look like her dad was because she had never known him at that age.  You see, in the photo, my grandfather is about thirty years old.  He was in his mid fifties when my mother was born.  The dad my mom remembers was between the ages of sixty and seventy-five!  One day while my mom and I were visiting my aunt who has Alzheimer’s Disease, I turned on my computer to show the photo to my aunt.  When she saw the photo she said, “That’s my daddy!”  It was then that I knew I had done a good job.  I later printed the photo, had it framed and gave it to my aunt for her birthday.

The most challenging part of this class was the weekly assignment of taking and posting photos.  Sometimes I would find great things to take pictures of.  Some weeks, I had no idea what to take pictures of and would find myself wandering around my yard and neighborhood in search of inspiration. I found some very unusual flowers around the corner; I hope to one day find out what they are called.