Written by: Tulio Moya Maravilla and Ada Ortíz Ventura

Tulio Moya Maravilla and Ada Ortíz Ventura participated in a workshop on photography and wrote this blog about their experience. Tulio and Ada both recently joined the staff of the youth program at the Mangrove Association. They also work as radio announcers for Mangrove Radio.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” stated Carmen Argueta, a member for the Board of Directors of the Mangrove Association during a workshop given by Tricia Johnson, the Amigos Fellow of EcoViva. The workshop, on photography and photojournalism, was held at the offices of La Coordinadora in Ciudad Romero.

The workshop included participants from the youth program- who are also radio announcers of Mangrove Radio- as well as members from other programs within the Mangrove Association, and the Mangrove Association board of directors.

One of the objectives of the workshop was for all of us to learn techniques and rules for photography and photojournalism, and the difference between both concepts. We discussed the importance of images, mentioning how pictures can speak for themselves and how to best capture them. Some of the techniques that we tried were ‘the rule of thirds’ which focuses on the position of your subject, ‘Move!’ in which you must move around the object to obtain the best angle, and relevant aspects like illumination, which is an important factor when taking a picture. We also had a practice session, which helped improve our picture taking.

The participants were active and expressed the desire to learn from this workshop, and also to put into practice all of the techniques and rules that Tricia taught. There is no doubt that photography is a process and an art that can be improved with practice. We finished the workshop by taking pictures and then displaying and evaluating the pictures that were taken.

For us, we were satisfied with the interesting workshop and it lived up to our expectations. It was very useful and we are content with all that we learned and with our participation in the photography workshop.