Sometimes, the smallest, most overlooked things in life can be the most beautiful. Students at Sonoma Academy learned this valuable lesson while on the Photography for the Hobbyist Intersession. While taking pictures of friends is fun, the most stunning photos proved to be the most unexpected.
At the beginning of the week, students learned the basics of photography from Darren Duarte, Fabrication Studio Lead at Sonoma Academy, who has been taking pictures for the past fifteen years.
Duarte said, “I was a little bit nervous because I’ve never taught this.” Despite his apprehension, Duarte was admired as a natural photography teacher by his students. “I met Darren for the first time, and he is pretty cool and funny,” said Nathan Schwartz (‘29).
In the mornings, students learned basic tips and tricks about photography, such as the rule of thirds, where the focus of your photo should be a third from the right, left, top, or bottom of the frame. Then, they got right to taking photos. Duarte said, “On a typical day, I tried to shoot for talking no longer than about twenty minutes, and then go out, take photos for thirty, forty minutes, or an hour.”
Students were tasked with taking photos of the various other intersessions happening around campus throughout the week. Schwartz remarked, “I was taking photos of the Woodworking Intersession, and I was trying to take a picture of Jamie doing wood stuff. And he had a pencil in his mouth, and he looked at me with a really funny expression right as I took the photo. And it was actually one of my favorite photos that I took just because it was really funny.”
Although live photography was amusing to students, one of the best photo spots was the simple ping pong tables. Students took great still pictures of ping pong balls resting on the tables, playing with the angle of shadow and light. When asked about the best unexpected photo spot, Josh Ma (‘28) confidently replied: “The ping pong tables. Ping pong tables.”
On the third day of the intersession, the class took a much appreciated adventure up Taylor Mountain that helped students learn the power of patience. As they started up the mountain, Duarte encouraged them all to slow down and try out the new techniques they had just learned about widening aperture to control the light intake of their cameras. Duarte says that he “kind of framed it as the goal is not to get really far and go fast. The goal is to take our time and just look for light and take photos of light.”
At first, students rushed right up the mountain, disregarding Duarte’s words. Eventually, though, they started to slow down, to find the small, usually unnoticed parts of nature, and to take astounding pictures of them. Duarte says that by the end of the walk, students were “just taking their time, appreciating what they found, trying to compose a really nice shot.”
In the end, most of the students’ favorite pictures were not the exciting ones of friends and Intersessions; rather, they were the close-ups of ping pong balls and the photos of nature at Taylor Mountain. The students on the Photography for the Hobbyist intersession learned a valuable lesson over the week: to take their time and appreciate the little things in life, as the most unexpected shots are usually the most beautiful ones.
