Saturday, July 9, 2011

West Michigan Street

For a slightly delayed anniversary gift, my husband surprised me with a photography seminar. Not sure how he found it, but the company was called Chimpsy, and they offered a Field Trip. We met up downtown today for this small class.

We were off West Michigan Street, and were sent outside on assignments. This was actually very cool, in spite of the fact I didn't get a whole lot of time to explore because the teacher and I both were extremely perplexed as to where to find my camera's metering mode. In my infinite wisdom, I grabbed the whole camera bag, thinking it had everything I could possibly need. So I had the manual for the Video camera, but not my camera. That was home safe and sound in a box with the Photography book Dad gave me for Christmas. Ugh. On the upside, I got very confused with metering mode in that book too, so I was kind of relieved and justified that I wasn't crazy, it really was hard to find on my camera.

So for my own recollections, I just wanted to post some of my stuff, so I don't forget. It was an intro class, so no fancy post processing or shooting in raw. All my pics are straight off the camera.

My first assignment was to focus on something and change my exposure level. I Just noticed, can you see the random classmate poking around in my picture with her camera. Ha!

This was my 0, the Indy Skyline.



Skyline at +2



And the Skyline at -2. (It's supposed to be a little extreme, but I actually kind of like it.)



I got to learn more about being in my creative modes. I have just begun shooting in Manual, but I still rely heavily on my eye, not paying much attention to numbers, just mostly thinking, um, that looks good, and if it doesn't I toggle all kinds of things around until it does.

Today's brief class gave me more feedback than I've been able to achieve on my own, asking questions. I finally have a much better understanding of aperture and shutter speeds. I even practiced taking pictures in Av (Aperture) and Tv (Shutter) Priority modes. It was kind of neat.

In Tv mode, we played around with shutter speeds. I was supposed to capture some moving object.



And then practice panning with the object so as to blur the background but still capture the object. Not bad.



Though my favorite assignments were the more creative stuff, go find things with lines, textures and colors.



Lines (above) surrounding the ceiling fan in the coffee shop (while I waited for the teacher to figure out my camera...unsuccessfully) but she's going to let me call her, when I find my manual. :)



And lines in an outdoor fence (with bonus close up) on a flower blooming we were practicing some depth of field too.



For textures, a little brick vs. stucco. Brick wins, hands down. ;)



And my Favorite: colors. I really find I love photographing flowers, they don't move around nearly as much as my boys do. As I was walking back to the coffee shop, I found this random begonia bloom on the sidewalk. So Bam - Color!



My Favorite Photo of the day. All in all, a wonderful class, especially for a technical beginner like me.

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