I need suggestions, please help!

[MozDean]

Hello all, I'm new here and I'm beginning to study photography. First off I want to say that I have found many great resources and help from this site and I'm really thankful for it. Anyway, on to my point. I work in a pre-school and we are having an art exhibit soon of our children's work to show their families. My boss is aware of my photography interest and she has assigned for me to take pictures of our community to have a couple of pictures up. I'm totally freaking out because I'm not familiar with the community here, and I know I don't have to be I'm just so inexperienced with this I'm not sure what to do. I have a couple ideasm, but I'm not sure if they are the right thing for community. I was thinking of going to important landmarks in the area and capture that. Am I on the right path?

[Nicole]

Does she mean the pre-school community (e.g. classrooms, events, teachers, kids, parents, etc) or does she mean your local community (e.g. landmarks, important buildings, etc). I'd say clarifying that would be the first step. Then once you know that, you'll know if you're on the right track and we can offer more suggestions.

[MozDean]

I believe she means a little on both local and pre-school community. She basically just gave me examples and they were "kids with their parents and some landmarks." not very brief, which is probably why I'm freaking out.

[Nicole]

Ok, so you've at least got some idea. So, first step, don't freak out too much. Second step, there's a wealth of reading that should get you started. A few articles from the DPS blog that might be handy to you:

How to Photograph Children
8 Tips For Capturing Family Gathering Candids
Environmental Portraits

So, those links are more about the photographing people aspect of things and the first one actually provides some good tips about getting the right settings (or at least some good starting points for settings). I included the one about catching family gathering candids because, well, you're essentially doing the same kind of thing. And the last one is in case you want to do slightly more set up shots, but keep the community environment in them.

If you're taking photos of landmarks, go out at different times of the day and see how the light changes the scene. Try shooting in the early morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, at dusk... you'll get totally different looks. But the other thing you may want to consider is if you want to keep the tones similar. So if you're doing all your people sort of shots during the day, you might want to do the landscape shots during the day. But that's up to you. Try different angles too, but you'll probably want to make sure that the landmark is recognisable, so consider that too, even though sometimes detail shots are really nice looking.

You could also make yourself a list of things you'd like to try capturing in each of the two types of the community. So a list of pre-school community shots, and a list of wider community shots. So, whether that's listing that you want to take pictures of each of the classrooms or at least 5 activities, or whatever, it will help guide you.

And last of all, find out just how many photos you need to provide and figure out what ratio of pre-school community to wider community photos you want to use.

Hopefully some of that is useful It's probably how I'd approach it at least.

[MozDean]

Those are some awesome tips. Thank you! It has put me at ease, I actually went out today and took some shots of USC. I haven't checked them out yet. I will for sure take your advice and take a couple of shots in different times.