Portrait of the Village Church

My granddaughters, 8 and 6 have now completed 3 “portraits” of houses, and I thought it would be lovely to do the village church. I invited three other little girls from our village who are 8, 7, and 6.  Today it’s half-term and there was a brilliant blue sky despite it being only 10 degrees, so we started ‘thinking and looking’.

We wanted to get “a feel” for the subject so we walked up with viewfinders, and they each took a photo on my i-pad. We won’t look at the photos again until the very end, unless I want to draw their attention to something.

A viewfinder can be useful to isolate the subject. I’m not sure how useful it is to a six-year old but it introduces the topic of “portrait or landscape” and gives us stuff to talk about! It was useful to me because by taking a photo of each child holding their viewfinder then letting them take a photo, I knew who had taken what!

So here is the church isolated as by the viewfinder. Next we went into the church garden to look at another good view of the church.

I suggested that each child may like to take a photo of something else in the church garden. Here are their other photos. I was interested that they went for the snowdrops, flowers and daffodils, rather than the little stone angel –

Although there were two photos of the mysterious hollow tree trunk…

And here are the things we talked about: the main colours (green beige/grey stone, and blue), and I also wanted them to all look and see that the sky touches the buildings, the trees and the fence and there isn’t  a white space with just a strip of sky up at the top!

PS You can see my little Westie, Islay in the first photo. When Izzy was 4 she said that Islay runs around sniffing the ground in the church yard because she can smell the dead people!