A few months ago, I secretly agreed to teach photography to a few people who love taking pictures. It is an informal but committed group, we do as much sharing as I do teaching. We meet once a week – I have not mentioned it before – and we have the nicest time.

I have a lot of issues with teaching, and a lot of issues with the way writing and photography is taught. So I wanted my students to understand that my view is just my view, it isn’t the accepted practice, I am not bound by the conventional wisdoms about how things ought to be done. That doesn’t mean that I’m right and others are wrong, it just means I don’t teach it the way other people might, for better or worse.

We communicate by e-mail, Skype and text, I don’t charge for it, I’m still uneasy about charging for teaching.

We do exercises and show one another our work. I forbid the mention of shutter speed or aperture settings, we don’t break the photo into third’s or fourths, or any other thing or setting. We don’t need to center the images, just ourselves. We are all moving forward, sharing in the excitement of stretching oneself.

Settings are to photographic instruction what grammar is to writing classes, I don’t pay much attention to either. For me, creativity is about the heart and soul, about voice and identity. If one is thinking about settings, it’s easy to forget the photograph.

That is just me, those things are important to many people and I don’t mean to denigrate them. The class is not about the technical nature of photography, it is about feeling and emotion and color and light and originality. We do talk about lenses, that is important.  We try and think outside of the box, we always try and take photos of things we normally wouldn’t see or photograph and we look for growth and impact and risk.

I take photos of Fate nearly every day, they seem monotonous to me sometimes. Today I stood out in the field and thought of our last class, it was about movement. Photographs have to move if they wish to be original, I said, different lenses, angles, awareness of light, a different eye for composition. I stood behind Fate and I lay down in the grass – always an adventure with sheep,  horses and donkeys around. Fate turned to lick me, the donkeys came over to sniff me and Chloe nosed my pockets for treats.

Eventually they all settled down and I got the photo I wanted – it took some movement – Fate in the foreground, sheep lined up to stare at her a few feet away. It came out okay, the experience of a dog and sheep from their perspective, not always looking down. A different way to see it.