Maebel Wampler, a scholar on the InSight Photography Project, goes out into the group taking images for a undertaking on Monday, Jan. 19, 2026.
Maebel Wampler is an eighth grader at The Dummerston Central School the place she finds herself amongst 150 different college students. Next yr she goes to Brattleboro Union High School with a scholar physique of 800. If anybody is prepared for that transition, it’s Maebel. And artwork is at her middle with pictures at its core. She admits to having had a tricky time with studying however artwork caught her consideration early on. Referring to her artwork instructor in Dummerston, Ben Ferguson, she mentioned she “put in serious effort in our one-a-week 45 minute art classes. After his class I’d go home and draw, make collages, model with clay. And then there’s my Dad Jesse who is the woodshop teacher at The Greenwood School for grades 6-12 in Putney. I’d work with him to make a cutting board for our kitchen, carve chess pieces, that sort of thing. Then in 2024, when I was in the sixth grade, I signed up at Insight Photography so I could learn with kids my age about how to use a camera and process film, enlarge… This was my big opening of a big door. And as it happened my first photography class there was the day of a full solar eclipse!”
Insight Photography, a nonprofit faculty for school-aged youngsters, was based in 1992 by John Willis and Bill Ledger, each “analog photographers” then. That is, they photographed with movie. (Digital pictures, now additionally taught at Insight, got here alongside later.) Insight began at The Teen Center the place Willis and Ledger created a secure house for youths. The mentors helped children discover their “voice” as photographers. They taught creativity. They supplied all of the gear and youngsters’ dad and mom paid what they might afford. All children had been equal. All these precepts stay in place within the new Insight lecture rooms.
When eighth grader Maebel goes to a specific class with two or three classmates, she walks Main Street after which goes to the Insight lecture rooms positioned behind Key Bank on the again floor ground. The entry door is on the far finish of the alley between Penelope Wurr’s store and Mitchell Giddings Art Gallery. Upon arriving, she walks right into a roughly 30-foot lengthy reception room. Adjoined alongside the east aspect of the room are a number of 8-foot excessive home windows that body a 25-foot lengthy, 8-foot excessive gorgeous, largely unbroken horizontal view of the Connecticut River under and Mount Wantastiquet throughout the river, a view that in some ways defines one gorgeous ingredient of Brattleboro.
The study-rooms are arrayed to her left: a classroom, a darkish room, a processing room, a digital lab and a photograph gallery to showcase, on common, the work of round 150 college students a yr. The digital lab has 12 model new Apple Computers (just lately bought via a grant) and supported by Brown Computers. It is in these computer systems that college students retailer and edit their photographs. At the center of the matter on the partitions of those rooms are lots of of scholars’ images. All this was mild to Maebel’s eyes when this sixth grader first heard about Insight in 2024.
She mentioned, “What do we do here? For example, in September 2025, when I was working with our Photo Group, we decided on a project. We planned to make photographic portraits of Brattleboro people in general, with particular focus on shop owners. These would be candid portraits, snapshots really, of a moment in time and place. We tried some posing shots too when we got started. We then edited and selected the best and displayed them at December Gallery Walk. The next two photo clubs will carry this project on – a kind of “legacy project.
“In order to focus our thinking on who to photograph, we in my club of three made a list of as many local businesses or organizations as we could. We then wrote up consent forms. In the end we chose to focus primarily on people at New England Youth Theater, The Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, Echo Restaurant, Marigolds as well as Mitchell Giddings Art Gallery.
“Once we choose a person in each – for example, Shannon at New England Youth Theatre – two or three of us go as a group to take lots of photos of her in different spots in the theater or outside it. Then we’d take pictures of her in different lights or backgrounds. Then back to Insight to develop and edit the pictures. Another time during Gallery Walk we photographed people in front of many of the murals in town.
“None of us really knew each other before we would go into town on a shoot but we got to know one another as we worked together. Then we’d go back to the editing studio to work and learn together under our teacher, Rachel Boettcher. And we’d say, ‘Do you remember last year when we did our first shoot and we got back here and said, ‘Oh no! What am I doing here!’ But we learned! The cool thing is that we’d find ourselves learning in a class with an 11-year-old and a 17-year-old. It was all a bonding experience.”
Rachel Boettcher, their instructor and Insight’s program director instructed this author, “Kids come here for classes organized in eight-week blocks meeting once a week for two hours. In our ‘Intro’ course, kids learn how to photograph with digital and analog cameras: the mechanics of it all: exposure, apertures, shutter speed, how to compose an image, the pros and cons of color vs. black and white, and how to express themselves through subject matter. We teach them about still life photos, nature or people photography, and how to create dramatic images. We also teach digital videography. Students make five-minute films that are presented on BCTV.”
Confidence comes from all this aware free-wheeling. Mabel, now solely two years into studying, has had multitudes of expertise and may now train newcomers the fundamentals of each digital and analog pictures. She’s had important expertise with Pentax K100 cameras with print movie; for digital cameras – A Canon T8i or R50 in addition to a Nikon D850.
So what’s subsequent for Maebel? “I want to become a photojournalist or maybe a Red Bull-sponsored surfer photographer. I’m already skiing every Thursday with Dummerston School so I might become a ski photographer, or maybe next winter I’ll work the ski-jump contests at Harris Hill.”
When I requested her what she felt I ought to find out about her as our interview was nearing its finish, she mentioned, “I want to go all the way in with whatever I do.” Imagine what this eighth grader will do together with her digicam when she goes together with her household and a few college students from Greenwood School to Ecuador in a number of weeks.