My Girl Scout Troop Earned the Ambassador Photographer Badge on an Overnight Trip to Cincinnati

 

And we had such a fun time!

Back when my multi-level Girl Scout troop was younger and very actively earning lots and lots of badges, we followed the philosophy that not every activity got you a badge. Sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Brownies earned badges for, and sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Juniors earned badges for. It was always fun regardless, and there were always lots more chances to earn badges later.

I do NOT follow that philosophy with my older multi-level Girl Scout troop. Up until her graduation, my now-college kid was still pretty active in earning badges independently, but the rest of the troop isn't interested in badge-earning unless it's something that we all do together. And considering that we only meet once a month or so, and many of those meetings are for travel planning or service projects or day trips or Higher Award stuff, not badge-earning, I really want to make our few and far-between badge-earning opportunities count for everyone.

So on this overnight trip to Cincinnati, the Ambassadors AND the Seniors all earned the Ambassador Photographer badge (when we earn a Senior badge together, I find an equivalent badge, whether it's official, retired, or "Council's Own," for the Ambassadors to earn). I rewrote the badge activities to better support the activities we'd planned and the skills the kids would get the most enjoyment out of learning, and off we went!

Step 1: Explore photography resources.

The kids were NOT super excited when, standing in our meet-up spot of the grocery store parking lot at the crack of dawn, just after throwing all their gear into the chaperone cars and just before getting themselves settled in and falling asleep for the two-hour drive, I pulled a GIANT stack of photography resource books out of a tote bag and divvied them up. 

Just a little light reading for the trip to Cincinnati!

These were all library books, and I tried very hard to choose ones that would be interesting to the kids, so I don't think it was too tough of an ordeal to have to endure. Here are the books we explored:

The goals were to see plenty of beautiful photos on a variety of topics, to build context for the history of photography, to get curious about various photographic techniques, and to be inspired to take their own beautiful photographs!

Step 2: Take animal/nature photographs.

The Cincinnati Zoo was the perfect place to practice taking nature photographs! 

The kids who are already well-practiced in photography concentrated on taking interesting photos from interesting angles, but most of the troop really just seems to use their smartphone cameras to take pics of their friends and their cats, so they concentrated on taking well-composed, well-focused photos. It's more difficult than you might think to take a sharp photo of a far-away animal!

While at the zoo, one of my Girl Scouts borrowed my DSLR and took what is possibly my all-time favorite photo of me:

Just me hanging out in the turtle enclosure with my turtle pal!

Step 3: Take city/architecture photographs.

Cincinnati is MUCH bigger than our pokey little college town, and there were lots of interesting things to photograph as we walked around on our own and with our food tour. The nice thing about architecture is that it stands still for you, so all the kids could concentrate on sharp focus and interesting framing.

I like how my college kid, now official Troop Helper to our troop, picked this interesting angle for her shot:

Step 4: Take food photographs.

Is there a more important skill in today's society than that of taking beautiful photos of your food?

We upped our food photo skills on a guided food tour through downtown and Findlay Market, concentrating on taking appetizing, Instagram-able photographs of all the various small plate items we were served:

My own photography was helped by the fact that I quickly got WAY too full to actually eat all the delicious food I was served!

Step 5: Take river/bridge photographs.

At the edge of downtown Cincinnati, there's a pedestrian suspension bridge that crosses the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky. We walked it as a troop, taking lovely photos of the vista across the river and of the bridge, itself.

I don't think that I tend to take very nice vista photos, a deficit that I prefer to blame on my basic kit lens:

I found a weird sticker of a camel to photograph, though!

One of my Girl Scouts entered a photo contest using a photo that she took on this bridge, and it looks freaking amazing, all crisp lines and saturated colors and interesting details. You will not be surprised to learn that she won first place in her category with that photo!

Step 6: Embellish/display photos.

Yes, there are only supposed to be five steps to earn a contemporary Girl Scout badge, so just call this my insurance that even if a kid skived off of a step, she'd still do enough work to fully earn the badge.

Besides, we had a whole evening in our Airbnb to hang out, and there's nothing better when you're hanging out with your buddies than doing lots of craft projects!

My co-leader and I brought all the supplies that the kids needed to create photo stickers and magnets and embroidery floss-wrapped Mason jar lid photo ornaments. It was my excuse to get even more use out of my sticker maker!

Because we obviously wouldn't have our photos from the trip to work with yet (I've been eyeing portable photo printers but I just can't convince myself to pull the trigger on one), I'd asked the kids to upload 6-12 previously-taken photos to a shared Google Drive, then I got them printed and brought them with me to the Airbnb. 

The kids did a lot of baking and chatting and watching TV and playing games and snacking, but they still managed to find time to make themselves stickers and magnets and Mason jar lid ornaments!

If we'd had more time to play around with this badge, I would have loved to have the kids collaborate on a photo book of our Cincinnati trip. I love the idea of them incorporating all of their photos together to make one souvenir album, and I think something like that would be a sweet memento. But these big kids are busy, and after we got home from our trip they had to move onto all of their schoolwork and college applications and extracurriculars and part-time job. Instead, I encouraged everyone to upload their photos to our Shared Google folder so we could all see all the beautiful photos everyone took on our overnight adventure to Cincinnati!

Here are some more photo display and embellishment ideas that I have my eye on for future projects:

• photostrip bookmarks
• DIY Polaroid picture
• Polaroid photo coasters
• marble magnets
• Memory game
• popsicle stick photo charm