Looking Through the PC lens...

By Courtney Centeno, PC Graduate Fellow 2010

    Everyone knows what it feels like to step in his or her own shoes, but what does it feel like to wear someone else’s?  Better yet, how do you explain to another person what you see through your own eyes?  One of the many goals of Project Coach is to relay to our high school students the idea that understanding and seeing different perspectives leads to more possibilities.  Role-playing and role-reversals were recurrent themes during our training sessions in the beginning of the year, and we used these devices often to help both redshirts and blueshirts become better coaches.   Articulating your own point of view is a step towards becoming a good coach.  Recognizing various points of views is a step towards becoming an outstanding coach and team player, on and off the field.

    To me, there is no better way to grasp the idea of perspective than from behind a camera lens.  Camera angle, lighting, framing, perspective, and composition are all critical components to not only understanding how you look at things, but also why.  For the remainder of our Thursday sessions, I will be working closely with Christina Gomez and Millie Alicea-Cruz on a photography project where they will express their points of view through a sequence of photographs.  The components of photography are the preliminary concepts of understanding perspective, and this project thus far has been a great opportunity for Christina and Millie to decide which parts of their world they want to put in a frame.