Week 6, 7 and 8

Whoops! I've been forgetting to upload my photos from the class!

Week 6 was a hard one for me. It was all about capturing light and I so badly wanted to captured some lens flare. No success. For me, this is going to be  a practise, practise, practise thing until I get it right. I did get a nice pic of my neighbours daughter using direct light, and practised on Tyler using indirect light indoor (he's hiding his vampire teeth) and on Craig using indirect light outside...

And for my second critique, I used a pic of my seriously sweet niece, Sam. There was a bit of a green glow on her chin from her swim suit (I'll fix that in editing). For all of the pics, the rules of the class are to use completely unedited, straight out of the camera files. And these are all RAW files so they are a bit flat knowing that you will edit them in Lightroom or Photoshop afterwards.

Week Seven was the portrait session. We had to choose something we wanted to work on. I chose to work on portraits that tell a story. We had our first camp out of the year. We set up our tent and had a campfire. I wanted to capture the excitement the kids had. Here are the ones I submitted but I took a bunch that I think I'll put in a multi-frame once I edit them a bit.

Week 8 is our progress assignment. We had to choose a photo from before the course and then one we took recently to show how we improved. I had a photo from Sam's birthday and one of my other niece Chloe which I took recently. I think the composition, depth of field, quality of light etc. is better in Chloe's picture. Agree?

Photo Editing

I'm experimenting a bit with editing my photos and how they can enhance your photos without them looking crazily edited. Here's an example I did quickly which I think improves the photo a bit... Original unedited on the left, edited on the right.

Week 5

Week 5 is all about custom camera settings (ie custom white balance, picture styles etc). We also had our first critique. Here are some of the pics I submitted:

 And just to illustrate the benefits of a custom white balance, this next photo was taken using the camera's tungsten white balance to compensate for the poor lighting. It doesn't look too bad.

 

However, when you compare it to the next photo that was a custom white balance using a gray card in the poor lighting, you can see how bright white the puppy's fur is. Custom white balances are quite simple to do and make an incredible difference in your photos.

We've been blogged!

My very talented photographer friend Catherine and I did an exchange of services... I designed her photography company logo and collateral and in exchange we received a family photo shoot. You can view the photos at her blog!

She was very patient with our crazy kids who don't really stay still very long and actually got a couple of Craig and I where we don't look dorky. That in itself is no small feat!