Seoul Through the Lens Day 1: Discovering Insadong

This year for Discovery Week I opted to re-discover Seoul, sleep, and my sanity by staying in-country and sponsoring a photography themed course called Seoul Through the Lens.  The beauty of this course is that I really do love photography and teenagers so I'm happy as a little clam to be out and about taking photos with my students every day for a week AND I've got two wonderful photographically savvy student leaders who are doing the technical teaching!  The course organization (read: money and supplies) and student management (read: grown up responsibility stuff like making sure we don't lose anyone) is what really falls on my shoulders this week.  I've got two other adults helping out, which makes life easier as well.  So far things have started off swimmingly.  Today we learned the basics of photography like how to navigate our camera and terminology like aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.  It's all good review and practice for me!

Once we could all successfully take a photo and adjust our settings, I handed out cash and subway cards and we hit the road.  Our destination: Insadong.  This is one of my very favorite spots in Seoul as it is an arts and crafts haven, plus there is a great Buddhist temple there.  We made it to the subway, through a station transfer, and to our destination with all 27 students and 3 adults in tow.  Whew!  When we arrived at the temple I was pleasantly surprised to see thousands of beautiful fall flowers arranged in an amazing display.  I couldn't describe it if I tried!  The kids spent about 45 minutes taking photos before we headed over the the main street of Insadong where they set out in groups to take pictures of the shops, etc.  

It was a good first outing for them and as they photographed I popped into one of my favorite stores--an art shop with handmade wood and metal pieces to see if they had the piece of artwork I'd been eyeing for the last three years.  Amazingly enough, the piece was there...and very expensive, as I knew it would be.  I decided to think on it while I took photos and looked after the kids.  By the time I finished lunch, I knew I had to buy my dream piece of art...so I did:).  I think the hi-light of today's photography for the students were these awesome (no other word really could describe them) ice cream cones that were shaped sort of like an elephant's trunk that were then filled with soft serve ice cream.  We'll see if anyone captured a picture--unfortunately I did not.  Here are my edited photos from today's shooting (after a weekend filled with photos, I'm going with the less is more philosophy):

This is a twist and focus technique that Joel taught today--sort of a crazy thing I'm playing with.