Its been over a month since we concluded our Shanghai Student Film Festival, but thanks to some unexpected ash clouds and union difficulties, the festival lives on!

Now buy the book!

Paint the World With Light is the first digital media challenge from The Student Creative, a book of student light paintings from around the world. The goal of this project was to have students use long exposure photography to show the unique character of their own communities.

When you purchase a copy of the book, you paint the world with a little more light; all of our profits go towards the Jacaranda Foundation, a school for AIDS orphans in Malawi. For more information on this and future projects, visit the Student Creative Website.


For more information on the Jacaranda School, please visit the Jacaranda Foundation's Website.

As a sad postscript, I would like to add that this book is dedicated to the memory of my mentor at Teachers College who passed away last week. Renee Darvin was a fierce advocate for Art Education, whose passion for the arts affected thousands upon thousands of students through her work as a teacher, a professor, an administrator, and Director of Art Education for the city of New York.

We'll miss you greatly Renee, thank you for everything.

One of the most difficult things about photoshop is in creating realistic photo composites. New photoshop users often struggle with neatly cutting an image out of one background and placing it in another. To that end, We Graphics" has a great series of tutorials on hot to cut and paste objects with different kinds of edges. All in one easy to find place!

Phoebe is a local photographer who uses her blog as a place to show sneak peaks of projects that she's working on, explore the use of her lenses, and share both her artistic experiments and successes. That's what I love about her blog- she takes you through all parts of her creative process. Check out, for example, this fantastic shot of her capturing a bee in flight with her new macro lens:



She also does great studio shots of children:



Phoebe's love of photography is evident in her blog, which was her own idea, and not a class requirement...

(Phoebe is in the 9th grade here in my intro to photography class).