Introducing Composition at an Early Age

I wanted to teach my son photography because it is the gateway to learning good composition. When I teach my students the rule of thirds I invariably received better artwork from them on future assignments regardless of medium. So for my son, I thought I could tie together art and literacy by building a narrative. I decided to focus on the narrative of his action figures to lure him out of the house on a sunny day.

I decided to play on his current love for Metroid. He has recently gotten very into playing Metroid on his father’s vintage Gameboy. When he is not playing Metroid he is drawing the character Samus or talking about it non stop. This boy gets so invested.

So I grabbed his Samus action figure, which by the way is female-HELLO strong female lead! And we went for a walk. Around every corner Samus encountered aliens of all sizes.

This gave me the opportunity to teach him depth of field. Here is his first depth of field photo from flowers in our neighborhood front yards. Here we managed to grow our narrative. Samus has just stepped foot on alien terrain.

I want to emphasize that my photographer only recently turned 5! He is learning to write site words and I think this will help him to hand write his brief narrative later that I plan to make into a book for my young illustrator/author.

I made practice of zooming in and out with the camera lens and the framing of his photos the additional art task. If you are doing this with a little one it just takes an adult hand to steady the lens and a few demos of standard settings like portrait and close up. Once they get the hang of it they are off on their own photography adventures.