Photography Class

I have always loved and admired great photographers. The ones that can capture a moment so precisely that you feel you are right there with them. Or the ones that make you stop and look and then come back and look some more. 

I love the sweet babies and the laughing siblings.

I love the close-ups as well as the wide-angle. 

I love the serious moments and the silly ones. 

After Caleb was born, Mark and I invested in a very nice 35mm Canon. We bought a few lenses and played around with it some but not much.

When the new digital cameras came out, we purchased a little point and shoot and we liked the results but I knew something was missing.

Finally, a few years ago, Mark sold his motorcycle and purchased a gun and I purchased a camera. Albeit it was a used Canon Rebel xti body but I did buy a few new lenses to go with it. I loved it right away but I have never been able to make it work "magic". 

Everyone once in a while I could take a good picture but I was still very frustrated by my lack of knowing exactly what the camera could do. 

Books weren't helping me, I certainly wasn't helping myself, so I decided this was the year. No more excuses - it was time, past time in fact, to take some classes. 

It has been tricky. I have class Tuesday nights from 6-8 and Mark works every other one of those so half the time I take the boys with me. They play with i-touches or watch a movie on my laptop and they have also been models for us to shoot at times. 

I have found that while some things are very easy for me to understand, like what the f-stop does, and how a faster shutter speed works and the purpose of different settings for the white balance, I am still working hard at getting all those things to work together. 

It's like learning a new language I tell you!

While I am working at it, our instructor has us do different assignments throughout the week to practice skills.

We have practiced shooting at night:

We have practiced using the f-stop to create depth of field:

We have practiced staying in one place and just adjusting the dial on your shutter speed by one increment each shot in order to see how the light changes:

We have also practiced composing shots under different themes. This last week's theme was Time. You could take pictures of anything you could think of under that title. Most of my class took pictures of clocks (the suggestion in the homework paper) and some of those turned out pretty nice. Two people took pictures of the sky - one at daybreak, the other at sunset. I was going to do something with the date and the boys but I hadn't fully worked it out in my head. Then I drove past the cemetery in town and thought aha! 

One other thing that we have worked on is not automatically deleting photos that we think didn't turn out perfect. This is a hard one for me because I am striving for perfect - perfectly crisp, perfectly clear, perfectly interesting.

But I do like this one of Caleb. 

The lightening was very low, right at dusk, and the lens I was shooting with doesn't open very wide so not enough light was reaching my sensor. 

The result was grainy, a little blurry, and not really interesting but for some reason I like it.

I really do.

Our next photo assignment is to choose a color and be prepared to share 20 photos focusing on that color. We have two weeks for this one since our instructor took a vacation to Aspen. I was going to go with red or orange since they are my favorite colors but then I changed my mind. I think I am going to shoot my least favorite color instead. 

White.

We'll see how it goes!