Briefing papers

These initial instructions will help you to carry out your investigation and fulfill your mission. This is how things are going to happen.

In search of investigations

This book is full of investigations to carry out, riddles to solve, and challenges to respond to! Each activity will allow you to collect clues, make deductions, and develop new strategies for making your pictures better and saving photography.

Page after page, we are going to study different pieces of photographic “evidence,” in other words pictures with issues that will help us to make sure we are on the right path.

From one page to the next, in order

I have set things out for you so that you can solve the mystery, little by little. Therefore, it is very important to read this book in order and to make sure that you carefully carry out each activity before you turn the page! If you like, you can use your white cardstock frame (see page 9) as a bookmark so that you can keep track of how far you’ve gotten.

Don’t be afraid to leaf through the pages of the book that come BEFORE your bookmark sometimes, and to go back and redo the activities that you liked or the ones that seemed hard to do, reread some of the passages, or even just look at the pictures.

Everything that comes AFTER your bookmark, on the other hand, should stay secret for as long as possible!

A long-term mission

Don’t be in a rush to move forward through the book. Solving the mystery of photography is not something you can do in three days!

Take the time to look at the pictures, think about your answers to the riddles, and refine your strategies. And take breaks from your reading, of course, to take pictures. Don’t hurry! It would be even better if the book could keep you company for several weeks.

Too easy?

If you were already taking pictures every now and then before you got this book, some things in here will probably seem easy to you at first. But watch out! Stay focused on your mission, even when it isn’t all that hard, because later, ha ha, it will be a different story altogether!

You will see that when the clues start coming together like hundreds of puzzle pieces and you have to implement several strategies at the same time in order to carry out each mission, you won’t be sorry that you paid attention.