Capturing Content: Pro Tips from a Music Teacher
by Dr. Andrew Edwards
Instructional Coordinator for Fine Arts at Peachtree Ridge High School and Lead Teacher for Music Technology for Gwinnett County Public Schools
Unless otherwise noted, all images posted below are courtesy of Dr. Edwards.
From the first moment that you stepped into a college music classroom you began to seriously study the art of sound. From music history and theory classes to music technology, private lessons, and conducting class, you learned to paint sound on the canvas of silence. I’m sure that you were like me and took your first job, ready to help every student join you on the journey of creating music and painting the silence. However, you probably quickly realized that in order to do that you need students in the room with you!
Recruitment and retention are key pieces of music classrooms and photography can be one of the best ways to quickly capture the attention of large groups of people. Social Media platforms have greatly exaggerated the importance of photography in recent years. Everyone is now striving to get that perfect picture that captures the emotions and affections of the viewer. As a music teacher these days, you may have moments where you find yourself more worried about capturing the perfect moment of light rather than that of sound. As the old adage goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words!”
If great photos of your students is important to you, but something that you struggle with, here are a few tips that might help you as you strive to capture important moments in the life of your music program! The tips provided here can be applied to all cameras. The cell phone camera has come a long way in the past five years and all of these tips will help improve cell phone pictures. However, the quality of the photo cannot compete with a DSLR. Consider purchasing a DSLR style camera from Cannon, Nikon, or Sony. Or, see if you can find someone at your school that will let borrow one for the times you need great pictures.
Tips to Get you Started
1. Zoom with Your Feet.
2. Photo Composition.
3. Change Your Perspective.
4. Change Your Subject.
5. Get Comfortable with Lighting. (Advanced)
6. Narrow Your Focus. (Advanced)
7. Practice Safety.
1. Zoom with Your Feet.
This is an especially important concept when taking photos with your phone! When you zoom in by pinching the screen on your phone you are actually just cropping the picture. If you can, use your feet to get close enough to your subject so that they fill the frame of the picture you are taking.
50mm Lens: F2.8, 1/125, ISO 100
50mm Lens: F2.8, 1/125, ISO 100
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2. Photo Composition.
Composition of a photo refers to where the subject of a photo is placed within the picture. Having the subject of the picture right in the center of a photo is a common way to shoot. However, it can be less interesting. Consider using a technique like the rule of thirds. For this, divide the picture like it was a tic-tac-toe board. The most interesting places on the photo are along the lines and especially where two of the lines meet. If you are taking a picture of the drum major at the football game, consider having he/she standing along the tall tic-tac-toe line on the left of the picture with his/her face where the vertical and horizontal line meet. It is often best if the person “opens up to” or is facing the larger third of the picture.
Image Source: wix
95mm Lens: F 2.8, 1/200, ISO 2000
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3. Change Your Perspective.
As adult humans, we generally walk around with our heads somewhere between 5 and 6 feet off of the ground. It is all too common for pictures to be taken with the camera about 5 to 6 feet off of the ground as well. As a photographer, you might want to get the camera down closer to the ground or higher in the air to get a unique perspective. Experiment with looking at your subjects in a way the average audience member or passerby would be unable to see with their own eyes.
28mm Lens: F 4, 1/250, ISO 2000
102mm Lens: F 3.5, 1/250, ISO 3200
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4. Change Your Subject.
A picture does not have to include a person’s face. Human nature compels us to want to take pictures of the faces of our subjects. Something about the eyes and the smile warms our hearts. However, a fantastic story can be told without using a music student’s face in the photo. For instance, you could take a picture from the back of a trumpet player’s head while he plays in Jazz band. This would highlight how the musician sees the audience or his music during a performance. Or, consider taking a photo of a saxophone player where you see their hands on the instrument between their shoulder and their waste.
28mm Lens: F 2.8, 1/400, ISO 2000
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5. Understand the Three Components to Capturing Light: Aperture, ISO and Shutter Speed (Advanced)
You can do this with your phone too! No fancy camera required, you can download the Camera+2 app for your iOS device.
When I was in high school I always wanted to be able to take great pictures. I even bought myself a pretty nice camera for what I could afford at the time. The only problem was that my pictures never looked like the professionals. It wasn’t until someone taught me how a camera works when I was 26 years old that I finally could take the pictures that I always wanted to take. Aperture, ISO and Shutter speed are the three manual controls on a camera. If you can practice manipulating and controlling them on your own you will be much happier with your camera shots!
5a. Aperture
The aperture of your camera is like the iris of your eye. It can open to let in more light or close down to let in less light. If you’ve never seen this happen, try the shining a flashlight in a friends eye and then taking it away. This same thing happens inside a camera. This aperture number is referred to as the F-Stop. A low number F stop will let in more light (f 2.8) where as a high f stop will let in less light (f-16). However, this will also result in a different depth of field. At f 2.8 there is a smaller range of distances from the camera that will be perfectly in focus, sometimes a desired effect. At f 16 a wider range of distances will remain in focus. For example, a group photo is very difficult at f 2.8. However, a soloist singing in front of a large choir might look nice with the choir more blurry than the soloist. It creates a sense of depth and draws the viewers focus.
5b. ISO
Let’s continue thinking of the camera as if it were like your eyes. Your eyes adjust to different lighting situations very carefully. Your eyes can be more sensitive in the middle of the night when your bed room is dark or less sensitive if you are standing in the sun at noon. The sensitivity of the rods and cones in your eyes are like the ISO rating on a camera. A lower ISO rating (ISO 100) will produce a much smoother picture with high levels of detail but it can often be too dark. Whereas, a higher ISO rating (ISO 64000) will produce a grainy picture, but it can capture light well in low light situations.
5c. Shutter Speed
This is how long the sensor, or film if you are old school, is exposed to the light. Shutter speeds can vary from many seconds in night photography to 1/2000 of a second or less. A slower shutter speed, like 1/50 second, will allow more light to enter the camera, however, if you have shaky hands the image can turn out blurry. A faster shutter speed, 1/2000 second, with stop anything in motions but it might not allow enough light in to see the details of the subject.
Capturing Light in Summary
The perfect lighting is a blend of these three ideas: Aperture, ISO, and Shutter Speed. You can consider these concepts in a triangle relationship. The triangle can be skewed to get certain desired effects that will help you to tell the story through your photo better.
The light meter on your camera will let you know if your settings are going to work for you before you even take the picture. All DSLR cameras will provide you the ability to manually adjust all of these settings, or it will let you pick and choose which ones you want to be able to control which the camera’s software will control for you. If you are a cell phone photographer, you can still practice controlling these settings on your phone, which I highly suggest you learn to do. Just download the Camera+ 2 app (iOS only)!
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6. Narrow Your Focus. (Advanced)
Creating a narrow depth of field can be created in a photograph by moving the f-stop number closer to 1. As a photographer, this is one of my favorite tricks to use. Increasing the aperture will open it up to more light, but reduces the amount of the photograph that will be in crisp focus. Consider that you were looking from the side at a line of bass players at the back of an orchestra. With a narrow depth of field your subject might be the second bass player. When you take the photo that player would be in clear focus and the other players would gradually be in less focus as they were further away from your subject. This can be a very compelling way to highlight a specific performer or subject. As a rule, the lower the f-stop and the closer you are to a subject the smaller the depth of field, or less of the picture will be in focus. An extremely narrow depth of field on a headshot could result in someone’s nose being in focus and their ear being out of focus.
200mm Lens: F 3.5, 1/200, ISO 500
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7. Practice Safety.
Yes, I mean don’t hang from tree branches to get the perfect shot! More importantly, I am talking about the anonymity of a student. Please make sure you know that you have the permission of a student to take and post their picture on a public forum before you do something that could get you in major trouble. A student’s family always retains the right to control the release of their child’s image. Secure the proper permissions from parents and students before posting pictures. It is good practice to show the students the picture before you post it in order to get their approval. A student may be self-conscious about something your picture inadvertently highlights, and they may prefer that you don’t post that picture. You will earn a deeper level of respect from that student by allowing them the ability to approve the picture before sharing it.
142mm Lens: F 2.8, 1/400, ISO 2000
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About Dr. Edwards
Dr. Andy Edwards is in his thirteenth year of teaching. Currently, he is the Instructional Coordinator for Fine Arts at Peachtree Ridge High School and Lead Teacher for Music Technology for Gwinnett County Public Schools. This is Dr. Edwards’ fourth year teaching Music Technology full time. Previously, he was the band director at Peachtree Ridge High School for six years and band director at Seneca High School in South Carolina for three years. Dr. Edwards’ primary instrument is the saxophone and he has a passion for guitar and mandolin. He was a 2004 graduate of James F. Byrnes High School in Duncan, SC where he was part of the AAAAA State Championship Marching Band. Dr. Edwards graduated from Furman University in 2008 with a Bachelor of Music Education. In 2017 he completed his doctoral studies for his Educational Doctorate in Music Education from the University of Georgia, where he focused on the measurement of wind band performance quality.
Dr. Edwards is an active researcher for assessment in the music classroom. He has been a speaker at the Georgia Music Educators Conference, National Association for Music Education National Conference, and the National Association for Music Education National Research Conference. He has also been published in the Research Studies in Music Education journal. In 2019 he was honored by the Give A Note Foundation as a winner of the Music Education Innovators Award, as well as the CIET grant from Gwinnett County Public Schools. Dr. Edwards is a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, Pi Kappa Lambda Music Honor Society, National Association for Music Education (NAfME), and Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC), and Technology in Music Education (Ti:ME).
Dr. Edwards has been a photographer for 8 years. His work has been featured in many publications associated with the Georgia Music Educators Association. He specializes in performing arts event photography. He currently resides in Buford, Georgia with his wife Kinsey Edwards, orchestra teacher at Alton C. Crews Middle School, and this daughter Ansley. Outside of music and photography, he enjoys woodworking and mountain biking.
You can find his portfolio of photography work HERE.
