Category: photo class

I’m taking a two-week photography class from the very talented Bryan Niven (portfolio and blog). Since it’s through the local community ed program it’s pretty casual. Last week only three other students showed up to class. I felt a little out of place since they were all easily over 60 but I enjoyed the lecture.

We were supposed to come up with three different concepts for our homework. Last night the girls in our church youth group went to the Thanksgiving Point gardens and I bought my camera along so I could do my homework.

I need to narrow these pictures down to three: the first one is my favorite but I’m not sure about what other two to use. I’d love any input. What do you think?

So how about you? Which ones would you turn in?

On Saturday I went to the lighting demonstration we had for the photo class. It was a lot of fun and very enlightening (tee-hee!). Nicole’s sister and one of her friends were our models. It was great to learn how to take advantage of different lighting situations and how to bounce light around using reflectors.

This was one setup we used:

And then here are some shots I took.

It’s been a while (years and years) since I’ve taken a photography class and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it. I’m still not sure what I want to do with photography (portraits, still lifes, landscapes, etc…) but I figure that everything I’m learning now will help me out with whatever type of pictures I want to take.

Here are the photos that I submitted for this week’s homework. We weren’t supposed to crop or alter the photos with software so the exposure that is a little off in some of them. (Please be forgiving!)

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This is a sample of camera panning, where a moving object is in focus but the background is blurred. (Many thanks to my cooperative nephew who was willing to repeatedly run from one side of my yard to the other!)

These next three are samples of images composed according to the rule of thirds. Basically it means that pictures are more pleasing when you divide them into thirds and place focal points at the dividing lines.

These two pictures are examples of deep and shallow depths of field. The egg in the foreground is in focus in the first but blurred in the second. It’s pretty hard to tell a difference at this small size, though. (The difference in depth of field would have been more noticiable if I had placed the egg directly in front of the bowl instead of off to the side.)

This is another example of shallow depth of field. The skull is in focus while the rest of the skeleton is not.

These two pictures are examples of choosing different shutter speeds for different effects. The first pictures has a very fast shutter speed (I think it was 1/2000 of a second) to stop the motion of the water while the second has a slower shutter speed (1/50) of a second to blur the motion of the water.

This is an example of juxtaposition. We were supposed to created an interesting composition by juxtaposing two objects (I used salt and pepper) and using negative space.

This other picture of my nephew was one of my favorite photos I shot for my homework but it was underexposed and so I didn’t submit it for class. But I just cleaned it up using software and I like how it turned out. It reminds me how much fun it was as a kid to run wild outdoors all summer long.

I started a month-long photo class this week that I’m pretty excited about. It’s taught by Nicole Hill, a local professional photographer. She works for Rubberball, a stock company and then teaches in her free time. Check out her blog, it’s fun. (She took Kelsey from The Next Food Network Star’s wedding pictures. You can go to her older posts to see them.)

The class I’m taking is a Photo 101 class that focuses on manual exposure. I first learned photography on a film SLR back in high school and I so know the basics of manual exposure, but I am pretty rusty when it comes to actually doing it. Shooting digital for the last 4+ years has made me lazy when it comes to exposing correctly because I know I can tweak the photo with software later. For the class we’re not supposed to alter our images since we’re learning about exposure, which makes perfect sense. But having this restriction is making me a little nervous about doing the homework for the class. Luckily for me, shooting digital means that I can take tons of shots of the same thing at different exposures and then submit the best one!