Meet Evan

In March I started volunteering as a photo teacher at the Jewish Community Center in Minneapolis. I meet once a week with Evan, he loves taking photos of people and also has a mental disability. My friend Andy is there to help Evan learn iPhoto, and be Evan’s model for our weekly lessons.

I didn’t seek out this opportunity, but I am very thankful I am able to spend time teaching and learning with Evan. He is very dedicated to learning aperture, shutter speed, ISO, depth of field, motion, framing and how to hold a camera correctly. Evan has a fear of taking a bad photo, he works to make sure everything is perfect before pressing the shutter. That’s a fear I struggle with as well, at times a bad photo equals in my mind I’m a bad photographer. That doesn’t logically match up, yet it feels like it should. I encourage Evan to take the risk and shoot photos and he encourages me to keep learning and exploring photography.

At the end of our time together I hope Evan has the knowledge and desire to keep shooting and I hope to remember its more important to take many photos than to take one amazing photo. I also hope Andy comes away with a career in modeling!