Photography for kids? Absolutely yes!
Photography helps kids to exercise their creative muscle and encourages exploration. It builds valuable visual and critical thinking skills for later in life. You may not be able to teach them as many photography skills at this age but you can familiarize them with a camera, or a smart phone with a camera, and give them different activities they can have fun doing.
Have in mind that kids like photography… They love to capture the reality through their own eyes! They can easily familiarize with a camera and they can make Art! It is true that kids are naturally curious and expressive. That’s why you should take into consideration that teaching photography for kids is less about learning rules It’s more about allowing creativity to blossom.
Photography is a way of seeing – the camera helps young photographers show others their view of the world.
Encourage them to shoot while lying on the ground or standing on tiptoes. Suggest they try shooting the subject from another side..
Teach your child how to use the zoom that’s on the camera to make objects closer or farther away. Then, make sure kids know they can zoom with their feet too. Getting closer or farther away from the subject is another way to change perspective.
Encourage kids to try more than one way to take a photo. A great exercise to encourage kids to explore with their camera is to hand them an object. Ask them to take ten photos of that object that are all different.
A photograph tells a story. Look over the child’s photos, and ask them to tell you a story about what’s going on in the photo.
At the end of the day, photography for kids can also build an appreciation of art in general. Besides encouraging kids to take photos, encourage them to look at photos too.
Go to an art museum and talk about the images or Google images of some of their favorite places or things. Talk about the images, about why they like them or why they don’t.
Sources:
carrotsareorange.com
expertphotography.com
