Champion Academy & FCAC

In the spring of 2021, Flower City Arts Center (FCAC) and The Champion Academy Extreme Mentoring & Empowerment Initiative teamed up to provide an immersive program for teens in digital photography fundamentals. Champion Academy’s members, aka Champs, studied with FCAC’s diverse group of passionate photographers and teaching artists. Throughout the course, Champs learned how to manually control and operate a professional DSLR camera and had plenty of practice making images out in their community. They learned tips on how to compose images with intent, explored the wonders of street photography, and experienced making photographs in a professional lighting studio. Once they had some time and experience photographing, Champs explored basic photo editing in Adobe Photoshop. They were able to edit and print a selection of images for their personal portfolios, which they can continue adding to as they grow. Each Champ was awarded a certificate of achievement for completing the course and was able to add those, with great pride, to their portfolios as well. With this exhibition we present to you a selection of the Champ’s favorite pictures as well as a few fun outtakes that help to tell the story of our time together.