Monday, April 20, 2009

The Camera Photos

I have mentioned earlier about Ricki having a camera, and her trip to the camera store. So a camera is not new to Ricki. However, her pictures tend to be poorly planned (if at all), and she really doesn’t know yet the terms “digital camera”, “negatives”, and the like. So since they are studying (along with “lenses”) the topic of “cameras” this week in her eighth grade science class, I decided to center her classroom adaptations to these REAL topics, rather than trying to help her understand exactly HOW a camera works.
A quite internet search gave me several pictures of cameras, a few of film, and a rather poor one (poor for Ricki) on negatives. I saw no pictures of people buying film, loading film, or doing other camera-related tasks. So I turned to my professional (read “expensive”) discs of pictures to use in preparing special education materials. These discs tend to have a picture of every major step in doing various activities, often 2 or 3 versions with different ages of models.
Well, I found no pictures of negatives, none of buying film, none of looking at photo albums......... only a few views of cameras, and a child taking a picture.
Maybe I am reading too much into this. But if they can have several pictures of bowling, of other pastimes.... why none to help a person with developmental difficulties learn the “script” for taking pictures and taking them to be developed? It is a very teachable skill considering the automatic cameras that do just about everything themselves.
OK. I am probably reading into it. Not everything can be covered on a disc (3 disks....). Even expensive ones. But I have a nagging feeling that tells me that they expected someone “responsible” to be calling the shots in more ways than one.

2 comments:

Risa Tzohar said...

You probably are reading too much into it. I can't remember the last time I bought film, or anyone I know did either. As for 'negatives'? When my son got married in 2000 we got negatives of the pictures from the photographer. Since then we have only gotten discs. And now we don't even do that, we post the pictures on Picasa!
Times change.

rickismom said...

Perhaps you are right. Yet the discs are about 5-8 years old (when perhaps film was still more heard of). Here in Israel photos from negatives is still not unheard of, and I think I was projecting that a bit. But people still DO have pictures printed for themselves, and make albums. And I remember developing photos during my visit to America 2 years ago, and I wasn't the only one at the photo counter....