Lately, photography has become more popular among the public along with the increasing use of social media. How make a correct use of photography became the topic chosen by UPH to be shared among the teachers through Teacher Seminar program which was a part of the 25th UPH Festival, Thursday, August 16, 2018 at 4th floor, C Building, Universitas Pelita Harapan (UPH). This seminar and photography workshop was presented by Ahmad Zaki, a senior photographer who was also active as the Program Monitor in NHK TV Japan.The purpose of this seminar is to share the knowledge about news photography to the public, especially the teachers, so that everyone is able to spread positivity.
Photography is the kind of content which appears to be the majority kind of content shared in social media right now. Thus the understanding on how to properly ?wrap? a photo to share as news is important. This session is also important to educate teachers about the ethics of news photography.
News photography is a photography work which involves planning, coverage, editing, and dissemination. Zaki mentioned two kinds of news photography, the first one is a planned one and another is the spontaneous one. A planned news photography usually focuses on inanimate objects, such as the architecture of UPH, while a spontaneous one usually covers current incident such as the earthquake in Lombok that happened recently.
Zaki also emphasized that in doing news photography, there are a number of things to avoid such as photos that might raise the discussion of racial, ethnic, and religious issues (SARA), and sadistic pictures. An example of a sadistic picture is a photograph that shows the bloody face of an accident victim. Sadly, this kinds of incident happens quite often in the social media because in this era, people really like to forward pictures in social media without any re-checking.
?Because a picture is stronger than a thousand words, so we have to be careful when we forward a picture. In Indonesia, there actually is an ethical code for publishing a picture,? he then added.
Following are a number of testimonies from the participants of Teachers Seminar ?News Photography?:
1. Budi Wijaya Lesmana (IT Teacher from BPK Penabur Sukabumi)
?Through this event I was able to learn so many new things, one of them is photography technique. The materials and the presenter are both very interesting and I was able to understand what he was trying to say. This event also gave many lots of new knowledge which I can use and implement in school such as how to turn a photo into poster or into a design, just like what the Design students of UPH had shown previously. I currently teach IT, so photography, design and journalistic are indeed a very new thing for me. In BPK Penabur Sukabumi we also have the cinematography extracurricular, and I think this material can be a very good use for them. This has been the second time for me to visit UPH and for me UPH is a very interesting university. With UPH Festival, we are able to see the academic excellence of the students here, but we can also see their achievements in sports, as well as art and designing. Some of our alumni have also gotten into UPH.?
2. Aditya Wiranata (Mathematics Teacher from SDH Daan Mogot)
?The photography theme is quite new for me, and through this event, I was able to learn about some photography techniques and how to make a proper caption. This is very useful for my hobby: collecting personal moments for the social media. Through photography, we are able to make something meaningful, especially as we add words (such as in caption) in it. I can make photography as a mean to spread positivity.?
