Photography Class

Since I wasn't busy enough... I decided to enrol myself into a short photography class this year! It was given at the Grande Prairie Regional College. It was a tad more on the technical side than I was hoping for, but I gained lots of good tips and tricks from the course. The main objective in taking the class was to have some understanding on what aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc. all mean. Aaaand I do mean "some" because before this class, my understanding was at a zero, on a scale from one to ten. Even now, I'm maybe at a 2. Tops. Putting your camera on "Auto" and taking pictures without really thinking is easy, but learning how to play with all the settings, and how changing the ISO will change the quality, and how to adjust your aperture to compensate for your shutter speed... that stuff is all a little bit more complicated. 

Why do I want to do this you ask?!?! Good question... even now I wonder... but truly, sometimes when my digital SLR camera is on "auto" or "program", I just can't get the picture I want! I know there should be a way on this fan-dangled fancy camera to get a better picture, but I can't... that is mostly why I'm learning. 

Anyway... here are some pictures to show some things I'm learning... These first pictures show changes that I made to aperture to let more or less light in (exactly the same picture though... ). 

And this is just a cool lens that the camera will automatically adjust to... who knew?!?

Then we learned about trying to capture motion. I learned that if I pan the camera keeping focused on one thing that I can get that one object clear (even though it's in motion) and the background will looked blurred. Assuming you have the correct shutter speed.... So I tried....

And tried....

And tried again..... 

And then I gave up. Cause I was doing something wrong. 

BUT! Then I went back to class and asked my teacher why it wasn't working.. and he said to pan in the same plain as my subject... so I tried again on a walk, and it sort of worked! See in the pic below... Russ was my subject, and his torso is pretty clear, but daisy is blurry, and the background is blurry! Ta-da! Obviously I still need a lot more practice with this, but it's a start! 

I also took a couple shots of Russ that day to try and use different lighting settings. The one below was suppose to have the sunlight on the side of his face so that you can really see the definition of his facial features. Kind of worked I think. Definitely doesn't look flat like many of the "sun-directly-behind-us" photos we normally take! 

That's all for now. Maybe I will share some more of my expertise with you another day.
If you're lucky ;)