My Camera

I'm meeting a friend from my fall photography class at noon today to start going over some class notes that ETK sent to me a week or so ago. In my original class, I had hoped to learn about white balance, aperture, F-stop, etc. But, that was not what the class ended up being about. ETK's class was. Hopefully in the next few months, you'll see a difference in my pictures due to my new knowledge.

Flickr: Time Suckr

I haven't updated my blog in the past 3 days because I've been working on trying to upload all of my pictures. But, it's not just about uploading. They must be organized. Organizing includes: adding tags, adding titles where needed, putting the pictures into sets and/or collections. Plus, I could geo-tag them all! I'm almost done uploading all of the pictures and probably about halfway done organizing them.

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!

Photography Class, Assignment 1

In the first class, we discussed why we were in the class. My main reason for taking the class is to learn how to use my camera fully. I can easily turn it on and use it as an "instamatic". I want to understand words such as "f-stop", "aperture", "balance", etc. The first assingment was to bring in a few pictures that we had taken in the past year. Here's the ones that I shared:


Phoebe was on my lap for this picture. I like how her eyes match the bed spread. We discussed that there was a lot of yellow in the picture. It is probably due to the lower light in the room. I would not want to use a flash to brighten up though as that would have caused her eyes to look weird.

I'm very proud of this picture. MTH and I were walking around Belfast when I saw this interesting juxtaposition. Here were these "new" colorful abstract art pieces in front of the "old" cathedral. But, the cathedral looks much better than the pieces of newer art. The cathedral is clean whereas the art is rusty and dirty. Plus, I was able to fram the cathedral with the art pieces.

In the first class, we had discussed how a lot of times we take "touristy" pictures. Put people in the middle of the frame and have the big castle in the back ground. I wanted to share a picture that we had taken where there an action taking place but that also captured the fact that we were in a different place.

As you can tell by now, I cherry picked the pictures that I shared with the class. I really like this one as well. It's the tower at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland from afar. I like the dots of yellow from the wildflowers that are interspersed in the grass. Also, although there is a huge amount of sky above the tower, I like the clearness of the sky by the noisiness of the grass.

This picture is the only one from my old camera. I took this one from ETK's window. We were watching the Georgia Half Marathon and for some reason, i thought it would be interesting to take a picture looking down. It worked. I like the shadows on the asphalt. The only downside is that this picture would have been so much better with my new camera!

This picture was my try at some abstract art. It is the ceiling in the City Hall of Belfast. I think that the symmetry could be better but MTH was waiting on me when I took the picture.

Photography Class

I'm hoping to take a photography class starting the second week of September. I was planning to sign up before leaving for vacation but that doesn't look like it will happen. Hopefully, the class will not fill up while I'm away. The class looks like it will help me to learn a lot about my camera. It's called Basic Camera Skills. Here's an excerpt from the class description:

The instructor will review the fundamentals of image capture and camera operation, guidelines for achieving proper exposures, and techniques for creating successful photo images. Students considering the purchase of a camera may want to attend the first class to get professional advice on what camera is best to fit their needs and interest. This class does not include instruction in darkroom or digital printing. Weekly assignments will be given.

I'm especially interested to find out what the weekly assignments will be. I also hope that we'll then discuss those in detail the following week in order to learn more about how to be a better photographer.