A Start - Landscapes

This is moving week for me so between that and the weather, I have no sunny photos. I am traveling today up to Jay Peak! Day off, so I should have more pictures by tonight. My plan is to try and improve what I have done here.

With all of these I was shocked by the quality I lost when faced with gloomy lighting and heavy mist.

So part two. I am sitting on the floor of my empty apartment getting eaten alive my mosquitoes, but it is the only place I have wifi. This assignment has been blood sweat and tears, literally.

Bonus and just for fun. Heavily edited bit of pretty.

Framing and Picasa

Here is my video and photos. They are not the photos I intended, but I learned a lesson about lens cleaning. It was never an issue with my Canon Elph... I also notice that a lot of quality has been lost in the process of making this video.

Rule Of Thirds

Composition and Aesthetics

I have been taking photos for years. All or most of my work has been an experiment in laziness. When I say this I mean I avoided understanding the technical side of things. I did not study the work of others and I never took the time to pick up a manual for any of my cameras or editing programs. I wasted many many many hours, maybe days, of my life trying to "learn" photography just by tinkering until something worked, me having no idea why it worked our how I could recreate it. If not for digital photography I would be in the poor house from just the wasted film alone or would likely have never pursued it.

In looking up composition and aesthetics I sought out the huge library of photos I have already and I tried to find examples of things I have done in the past by instinct. I believe that anyone on the planet can hit these points just by having human eyes. I think we are able to naturally frame a shot if we are paying attention to what our eyes are telling us.

These of course are not my photos for grading and I am not trying to submit them for grading. I went on a trip to New York yesturday and took the rest of my assignment photos during that trip. I hope they turned out. Going to look at all my pictures from the week tonight. The photos I am sharing here are merely meant to be a part of my blog post, an experiment to see what came to me naturally in terms of my past picture taking.

I used this neat and simple site to see if I was hitting any of these points in the past. I shot most of these old photos on my little Canon Elph.

http://photo.tutsplus.com/articles/photography-fundamentals-articles/14-composition-technique-that-will-instantly-improve-your-photos/

In reading about Composition and Aesthetics I visited quite a few sites and read a few article and while photography is art and very subjective there are some pretty good rules you can follow that will help you improve your stuff. After reading up on it I have a better understanding of why some photos seemed to work and others did not.

Per the web link I provided, what rules do you think apply to any of these photos. In what ways was I successful and what would you have done differently from a technical perspective?

 

Light experiment.

 Sunlight from the right.

 Also sun from the right but this angle showcases the item better.

 

 Same time of day only in the shade without a flash.

 Indoors, soft lamp from above natural light hitting the front.

Middle of the night, no flash, longer exposure.

Color Scheme

 Analogous

Complementary

The Finer Things

This weeks assignment took some tinkering. Because I did not have a macro lens for the SLR camera I am using I had to play with the tools I do have. For these photos I used the Canon adapter to attach a 7mm extension tube. I tried a few different ones but this ended up being the best option. The longer tubes made it impossible for me to get any distance between the camera and the subject matter. I don't completely understand why, yet. 

Before attaching it I narrowed the aperture all the way down for greater focus and used an outside illumination source to make sure plenty of light was available. I was forced to adjust my focus manually because my Canon lens was now no longer directly attached. I also used a tripod and a small time delay to make sure that there was as little blurring as possible. It took quite of bit of experimentation but I am pretty happy with my first "Macro" photos. There is still some focusing issues, but I suppose I need to work on making my manual focus skills a bit better or just invest in some auto focus extension tubes or even better yet, a Macro lens.

The collage is at the very bottom of the set. I chose a simple collage. I have been using Picasa 3 for a year or so, so it wasn't too foreign to me.

My theme was a ladies closet and jewelry box, mine to be exact. I tried to get textures and color. =)

You can actually see my fingerprint on the large green gem!