For Christmas, my husband got me a course from Nicole’s Classes. I wanted to improve my skills with the camera. I really enjoy taking pictures, but am fully aware that I’m limited by technical capabilities. To sum up: there are many buttons on my camera that I don’t know what they do an am afraid to change in case I can’t figure out how to change them back.
So for the quieter time after Christmas, I decided I would learn how to take pictures better.
The course is a four week course. The first week paid for itself. We learned about lighting: shutter speed, f-stop, ISO and equivalent lighting. Now, I’d learned about ISO before and it was my single and sole method of correcting for lighting. This means that most of my photos, especially the indoor photos, are taken with very high ISO. My MIND WAS BLOWN by the fact there were three other ways I could manage light (short of flash), and I had been using the worst of them previously. Now, I had actually read a few photography books, and I knew I was missing something here, but I had trouble putting it all together. This made it make sense finally. (Bonus! Who knew there was a light meter on my camera letting me know – ahead of time – whether a picture was over or under exposed!)
So for your enjoyment, here is my homework for week 1:
Assignment 1 – Change the Depth of Field (two pictures – one with shallow depth of field and one with deep depth):
Assignment 2 – Daylight vs indoor ISO
Assignment 3 – Slow vs. fast shutter speed (sense of motion vs sense of stillness)
Assignment 4 – we were supposed to follow “a day in the life”. I picked Grey to follow for the day. I will confess that this is over more like 2 days, but I apologize for nothing.
For those of you who find yourself begging for more, here’s a complete link to an album with all the pictures from the week, some of which are pre-class and others of which are me practicing!
My Truant Pen 