Students spend ‘day off’ at biathlon Limestone photography class takes aim, shoots at world championships

PRESQUE ISLE – A group of Limestone teens joked Wednesday that if they’d known about the cold, they would have thought twice about taking part in a “day off” from school to attend the 2006 Biathlon Junior World Championships.

The six high school students spent the day outside at the Nordic Heritage Center shooting hundreds of pictures as part of a project for their digital photography class.

Although their teacher commented that the weather was “really nice” compared to other event days, after four hours of snapping outdoor pictures, the students huddled in the spectator tent at lunchtime to warm up.

But all agreed they were glad they’d come.

“With every click, there’s a surprise,” Crystal Silva, a senior at Limestone Community School, said Wednesday. “There’s so much happening here.”

“And sometimes things happen faster than you can get a picture,” Chelsey Ellis, a junior, added.

For others, it was getting a shot they didn’t expect.

“I was taking pictures of the trees in the snow and some athletes skied into the frame,” senior Amanda Churchill said Wednesday.

“You just don’t realize the things you’re going to get in your picture frame here,” agreed junior Chelsey St. Pierre.

The students were able to take part in the hands-on photography experience because of a project designed by Jen Flynn, their computer technology teacher, and Nick Patterson, their photography teacher.

“When we found out that the middle level students [grades five to eight] were supposed to visit the venue, we had already been working on putting an online paper together and we thought, ‘What a great opportunity for the students to photograph a world-class sporting event and showcase Limestone’s visit to the venue,” Flynn said Wednesday.

Patterson handled the digital photography aspect of the learning experience, such as composing shots. Flynn will show students how to use photo-enhancing software to cut, crop and finish their pictures.

The photos will be included in the school’s online newspaper, which Flynn said should be up and running soon. In the meantime, she said, the students are getting some invaluable experience in both photography and life.

“They’re getting a chance to do something they’ll never do again in their lives,” Flynn said. “There’s so much more learning that can take place here than in the classroom. For a class like this, you need to go out and photograph the world, and we have the world at our doorstep.”