Photography Class, Assignment 2

Our second assignment was to only photograph nature. At first, I thought I had it made. We already had a trip planned out to just east of the Shenandoah Valley. Once there, I realized that I didn't have enough charge in my camera battery to take pictures. At that point, I was not too happy with this assignment. I live in the city. How in the world was I going to photograph only nature once I got back from our trip. It turns out there's a lot of nature in the Richmond city limits. I headed over to Maymont Park to see what I could see.

Some of the ideas we were supposed to incorporate into our pictures:
1. Leading lines
2. Perspective
3. Rule of thirds
4. Harsh sunlight

Here's what I shared with the class along with a few comments:


To me, this picture looks like I took it while I was in the mountains but it is at Maymont using two cedar trees to frame a view of a small hill.

This tree is actually a double tree. That is, the roots of the two upper trees are intertwined. I took the picture by putting myself in the crook between the two trees and looking up. Again, I'm happy with how the picture makes the trees look so much taller than they really are. If you've ever been to Maymont, you wouldn't realize this picture is from there.

Not my best picture.

My worst picture of the bunch.

I like how the bamboo frames the bottom of the tree but I didn't like the extra piece of bamboo at the bottom. Since it's a public park, I can't do anything about extraneous items in the pictures.

This picture is ok but it's the reason I started taking pictures of the water which you'll see in the pictures that follow.

I like the softness of the tree by the shininess of the brook.

The cool thing about this picture is that the reflection of the tree did not show up in the brook to my naked eye. It only showed up in the picture.

More leading lines.

Although I would normally take the picture of the full tree, I really liked the yellow flowers that were growing under the tree. I sat down on the ground and took this one. The interesting tree trunk added even more to the composition of this picture.

I wanted to fill up the picture with the weird texture of this dead tree.

I happened to look up when I was walking away from the Texas Beach trail near the James River. The view made me think of the pictures of the jungles in Vietnam. One person in the class thought it looked like a picture of fabric.

In the end, I felt much better about my pictures after the class as I got a lot of good feedback.

Next week's assignment is to photograph people. I'm going to a wedding for the weekend with a fully charged camera!