The photography group settled on the idea to capture the spirit of the community by photographing its members. Portrait photography was something a lot of the group was very excited to try out. Overall when it comes to taking portraits the focus is on the face of the person and the images can display the person’s emotions, background and personality.

We set off to capture stills of people in different places in the university campus. The host students took us to a few amazing locations where we got to see a lot of interesting things, including a dance performance from a student dance group. When it comes to shooting images a really important thing is location and we were quite unfamiliar with the campus. It was amazing that our hosts could show us interesting places on their campus that they think would be a suitable locations for photographs.

Ngong

Visiting Ngong was  an absolutely amazing experience. We broke off into groups to capture footage of the community. My group visited a children’s home where we were allowed to photograph the location and the children. We were discussing how the community could benefit from a community media centre and capturing footage to illustrate our theme. Some of the topics included domestic violence, the gap between the rich and the poor and preserving Kenyan culture.

Final Edit of “Faces of the community”

Our last day at Kenyata University was spent finalizing our project which we had to present in front of the rest of the groups and tutors. The most fascinating thing about the whole project was that at the end we ended up with over 2,600 picture to look through. The way we handled that is by editing it down twice, once down to 200 and then down to 35 which made it to the final presentation. Our hosts suggested that we should use music to enhance the feeling of the photograph. They recommended some really interesting African music that blend very well with our overall theme.

During the presentations we got to see everyone else’s work as well, which was really interesting. I think the video group did very well in portraying the issues discussed in their videos, such as Tribalism in the kenyan community.