On the 9th of November 2022, the Ashesi Design Lab (D:Lab), under the auspices of the Ashesi Entrepreneurship Center, organised another exciting edition of its Maker Session series. These Maker Sessions are organised to allow students to have access to hands-on experiential building and fabrication of things into reality. These sessions also help in the fulfilment of the fourth and ninth United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) by fostering innovation and providing a lifelong learning opportunity for students in Ashesi. For this year, the primary focus of both sessions was editing pictures professionally. The first of these series, successfully held on the 19th October 2022, received an overwhelmingly massive attendance from the Ashesi Community, majority of whom were students. The second edition was to offer a chance for those that didn’t sign up for the first session to take part, and also for them to dive a little deeper into professional photo editing. The attendance, once again, was very impressive as about 30 students gathered at RB 100 to learn the practical skill of professional photo editing.
Augustus Poku Sarkodee
The visiting special guest facilitator for this Maker Session 2.0 was Augustus Poku Sarkodee ‘21, popularly known as Gus or Gustus. Gus is an Accra-based portrait and editorial photographer who has carved a niche of classy editorial photography for himself. He is an Ashesi alum and the creative behind all the breathtakingly beautiful Ubora Excellence Awards posters around campus. Gus took the participants of the Maker Session through photo manipulation, photo enhancement and image editing by using Adobe Lightroom and explaining the basic concepts found in this software. These concepts include image saturation, colour hue, crop, warm and vignette. His instructions were based on a golden lit picture which he manipulated to explain the different concepts in Lightroom. Aside from this, Gus engaged the students by displaying other photos and made them guess the possible edits he might have used on them. This helped the students recall some of the edit concepts he explained.
Gus checking out some of the photo edits students have done
As usual, there were enough treats of assorted drinks, cakes, meat and pies for all attendants. Feedback gotten from this photography Maker Session 2.0 was also very encouraging as the first session. The participants were grateful for the opportunity provided to hone their photo editing skills and were ready to edit some pictures for their social media accounts.
A student editing a golden lit picture