Today we started the workshops and community project with Kenyata University. I am one of the four students who are handling the photography group. The whole thing begun with us asking the students from the host university what it is that they would like to learn more about. Overall everyone said that they are very keen to learn more about how to manually control the camera.

I really enjoyed the way the whole day played out as everyone contributed to the knowledge sharing process. It was a very interactive workshop where the focus was on on hands-on experience. We were asking each other questions and trying out different techniques you can use on manual mode. Everyone seemed to enjoy working with the different shutter speed settings and capture sharp movement or blur.

After everyone was properly informed on the meaning of community media, we started a brainstorming session about how the spirit of community can be represented with photographs. We settled on the topic: “The faces of the community”, which will feature both portraits and street photography with human presence. For the last part of the day we broke up into groups and took some portraits of each other as well as other people on campus. We also spoke about the concept of digital storytelling and discussed a possible collaboration with the audio workshop group in which we could use some of their recorded interviews in combination with our images to create something to tell the story of the community and the importance of community media.

The atmosphere was amazing throughout the whole day and everyone was very enthusiastic and passionate about what they were doing. That made the whole thing an even more worthwhile experience.

And just a little non-work related update. We got to experience a crazy amount of rain being poured down on us in record time.