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When you do nothing, you feel overwhelmed and powerless.
But when you get involved, you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes
from knowing you are working to make things better.--Pauline R. Kezer

Photography's Power to Trap a Moment

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Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Interacting with the children at Fei Yue

I have never had so much fun doing CIP before. It wasn't the usual boring CIP activities which I had participated in the past. Today was different. Somehow I couldn't quite put it into words. It's just that having taught the children what we learnt from Photographic Society, i suddenly felt that photography has a new meaning to me.

It is not just a form of expression for the individual but it is capable of bringing joy to people as well. Initially before going to Fei Yue I think I was going to teach them anything interesting at all. Besides, it feel so interesting when our instructor taught us these photographic skills in the classroom. But the children's response took me by surprise. They were not only eager to learn, they were enthusiastic in participating as well. For example, when we were introducing the different modes available on the compact camera, many of them started to ask questions like, "Where? What does it do? How do I use it?"

These questions prompted us to teach more than what we have prepared. We enjoyed ourselves even more during the games session where we drew pictures that were taken with the different modes and asked them to identify which mode was used to take that picture. During this game session, I could clearly see the beauty of a child's innocence. Although they got the answers wrong several times, they refused to give up but tried again and again. I would never have seen this side of them if I were to do the usual things like raising funds.

Another part of our interaction was to allow the children to try out what we have taught them. This picture was taken by one of the children.

This picture was taken by the child when her friend excitedly ran over to her with a camera in her hand and both of them took pictures of each other smiling with the cameras. At that moment I thought to myself, "We should spread the joy of photography."

The only pity was we couldn't spend more time with the children to get to know them better. This visit only allowed us to see the conditions of the place in which they spend most of their time at and their bubbly nature. Given a second chance, I will definitely to this again. This beats taking random pictures just to hone my photographic skills.

Change makers5:28 AM

1 Comments

1 Comments /h4>

Unknown said...

“It is hard to describe my feeling at that moment…when I saw the sweet smiles on the little girl's face… all my stress and unhappiness seemed to disappear suddenly. I have never encountered such emotions before in being a volunteer.”

7:56 AM

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