Junior Digital Photography and Outdoor Art

My troop is Brownies and Junior and for reasons of no interest to any of you, we have one fifth grade Junior, eight fourth grade Juniors and six second grade Brownies. If you review this blog you'll see that for the last two years I've run joint meetings for Daisies and Brownies, relating Daisy petals to what the Brownies were doing.  It worked well, but resulted in a very leader-directed group.  While I polled the girls about the badges they wanted to do, in order to make things work for both groups, I was the one making most of the decisions. 

I wanted to change that this year, however, I didn't want to commit myself to running two troops   The compromise I reached, in part due to my desire to meet outside due to Covid, was to continue to have one joint meeting per month on the same night when we have always met, and one meeting per month on Saturday morning when I split the troop and meet with the Brownies at 10 and the Juniors at 11:15.  My goal is to make the Saturday mornings much more girl-led. 

Our last two joint meetings covered the Outdoor Art badges for both groups.  However, the Juniors were supposed to talk to an expert, so I put that off until  their solo meeting.  Also, since the expert artist was a photographer, I decided that Digital Photography would be our next badge, and she could cover both topics.  

Per Badge Explorer, requirements for Digital Photographer are:

Find out how to capture a winning photo with your digital device, whether you're using a phone, tablet, laptop, or digital camera.   

Learn about digital cameras from an expert 

Take tons of photographs! 

Edit three photos

Make a digital photo project 

Share your photos    

When you've earned this badge, you'll know how to use a digital camera to create one-of-a-kind photos. 

Our expert was one of our moms who is a portrait photographer.  She brought her fancy camera and talked about its parts and how it worked and how it compared to a cell phone camera. She talked about lighting and shadows and art in general.  Then we set up a photo booth (a chair with some props).  She took each girl's picture and while she was doing so the other girls did too.  Then I cut them loose to take pictures of each other all over the year for the last few minutes of our meeting.  Unfortunately is was overcast so there were no shadowed/light areas to compare and contrast. 

I had some tablets and old phones and I had asked those who could to bring a camera.  When I got home I uploaded the photos from my devices and asked other parents to do the same.  Our artist mom posted the pictures she took and I asked each girl/parent to pick out one of those to print.  I'm going to have each girl pick a picture or two of herself to edit next time, and hopefully the sun will be out so we can play around with sun and shadow, and take and edit some pictures of buildings, trees, etc.  We'll make frames for our professional photo, for requirement 5.  Our expert was requirement 1.  The photos are 2, which leaves us playing with editing for 3 and making a photo collage for 4.  I have apps that make it possible to both edit and make collages, so I'll get parents who can send devices to download the apps onto the devices before the meeting.