Photography is offered as an option choice from Year 10 and it is taught as part of the Art and Design specification.
Firstly, students explore ideas through lens-based and light-based media and work with digital, traditional film and darkroom techniques.
Through the GCSE and A-level photography courses students will experience how to use elements of visual language, line, form, colour, pattern, and texture in the context of photography, and gain an awareness of the intended audience and the purpose for their chosen area(s) of photography. Students will discover how ideas, feelings and meanings can be conveyed and interpreted in images, and how photography relates to social, environmental, cultural and/or ethical contexts.
The courses enable students to respond to an issue, theme, concept or idea, and work to a brief to answer a need in photography, to discover how to appreciate a viewpoint and gain compositional awareness. It is an essential for students to investigate historical and contemporary developments, different styles and genres in relation to photography and how images, artefacts and products relate to social, historical, vocational, and cultural contexts.
Through technical exploration students will discover the appropriate use of the camera, film, lenses, filters, lighting and understand the techniques related to the production of photographic images and, where appropriate, presentation and layout.
The teaching guides students to be visually articulate and to confidently create engaging images that integrate critical, practical, and theoretical studies.