For this unit, I learned about how to become a better photographer and how to digitally tell stories.
The challenges I had during this unit were mainly that it was a lot more work than I thought it would be. I think I underestimated it mainly because I don’t usually do creative assignments for my classes, so it’s not something that I’m used to. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but I thought that I would comfortably be able to do all of the assignments in one afternoon which was not the case. It was also harder than I thought to tell a story digitally because it was sometimes hard to think of ways to add in other elements to the story to enhance it. Most of my stories just ended up having a lot of hyperlinks to other websites which I think is definitely an aspect of digital storytelling, but I think that I probably could’ve included more images or other visual aspects. This week I did four visual assignments, and you can find them here: A Trip to Reykjavik, Don’t Explore Iceland, Iceland’s Four Seasons, Iceland StoryMap.
After this unit, I think I’ve started to see photos differently. I’ve never been a huge photographer, but I’ve casually taken photos for a while since it’s super easy to do with phones now. But whenever I’ve taken photos I’ve never really thought about the story behind an image, so it was kind of fun to take pictures (either myself or already existing pictures) and come up with stories to go along with them.
I learned a lot about photography from this unit both from the Photoblitz activity and the photography tips and tricks we looked at. I learned to be more experimental with my photos and to also how to apply some new techniques that I’ve never used before.
What does it mean to tell a story visually? I think the most important part of digital storytelling is including more than just one thing in your story. For example, if you’re telling a story based on a photo, you can’t only use the photo to tell the story. You should also be linking to other websites, including other photos or videos, including gifs, and/or including sounds to entice the reader and make the story more engaging.
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