I need to start working on my titles. I feel like people should have some concept of what they're about to read when they see the title of a blog post or article or whatever... but then maybe mine hint that what follows will, in fact, be utter nonsense, and that is completely accurate.
Anyway, this blog post will be a little different, as I'm about to talk about something that I really am not the best at. (Though haven't most of my blog posts been about that...? Oh well. Sad face.) It's also going to be about my first real shot at doing this particular thing for awhile.
When I was in college, my Dad got me an awesome camera for a birthday/I-signed-up-for-a-photography-class-and-needed-some-kind-of-thing present. And in this class, we were taught about ISO, F-stop, shutter speed, etc., but then our teacher summed it all up to say, "Your cameras are all new, they all have great technology, and believe it or not, the auto mode is actually there for a reason." Sometimes I'd try to play with the manual adjustments, but when I was out anywhere trying to take pictures, I'd usually end up giving up for the sake of taking less than a full minute per photo, and snap it into auto mode. Which was a terrible habit to get into. Awful awful.
Also, I'd like to state that I will more likely than not never ever be a fabulous photographer. My mind just doesn't work like that. I'm not good at seeing images that I want to capture in that way... I either see things that I just want to stare at for hours in person, or as I'm looking at them I find myself imagining how I would fit that image on a canvas or page and what medium (paint? charcoal? ink? graphite?) I'd use, and so on and so forth. And this, for me, is where the photography comes in, as life rarely provides the occasion to stay in one spot for hours.
So this weekend, I went out with Ashley and Chris, a couple of friends who actually know what they're doing, so that they could teach me to at least try to suck a little less at this whole thing. They were magnificently patient with me, and the pictures I took (while still being hilariously childish) turned out better than I expected. I fully anticipated a bunch of blurry, dark, blue rectangles to come out of my efforts. It occurred to me later that I definitely should have put together a socks/sandals/hawaiian-shirt/bucket-hat outfit to make it obvious to everyone in the vicinity exactly what level I'm on, but I'll just have to count that as a missed opportunity.
Some disclaimers/excuses:
1) I didn't even try to take any pictures of anything that was moving.
2) I'm only going to post the halfway decent photos on here, because, I mean jeez, d'ya think I'm stupid?
3) We went in the evening, during the "golden hour," which means that everything was gorgeous, and the brick walls I was pointing my lens at were kind of hard to mess up. But I definitely still managed to do so.
4) The settings on my camera were magically set so that I barely had to do anything to them. As it started to get dark, I had to fiddle with it a little bit, but not much. There are some settings I could have (and probably should have) messed with, but I chickened out a little bit. Namely, Ashley was encouraging me to try lowering the f-stop (aperture), so that the backgrounds of the photos would appear more blurred. As I said, I totally chickened out of messing with it. We didn't have much time before it got dark, and I was terrified of spending fifteen minutes squawking "WHY IS EVERYTHING ORANGE AND UPSIDE DOWN." (These are the problems I have.)
Anyway, this blog post will be a little different, as I'm about to talk about something that I really am not the best at. (Though haven't most of my blog posts been about that...? Oh well. Sad face.) It's also going to be about my first real shot at doing this particular thing for awhile.
When I was in college, my Dad got me an awesome camera for a birthday/I-signed-up-for-a-photography-class-and-needed-some-kind-of-thing present. And in this class, we were taught about ISO, F-stop, shutter speed, etc., but then our teacher summed it all up to say, "Your cameras are all new, they all have great technology, and believe it or not, the auto mode is actually there for a reason." Sometimes I'd try to play with the manual adjustments, but when I was out anywhere trying to take pictures, I'd usually end up giving up for the sake of taking less than a full minute per photo, and snap it into auto mode. Which was a terrible habit to get into. Awful awful.
Also, I'd like to state that I will more likely than not never ever be a fabulous photographer. My mind just doesn't work like that. I'm not good at seeing images that I want to capture in that way... I either see things that I just want to stare at for hours in person, or as I'm looking at them I find myself imagining how I would fit that image on a canvas or page and what medium (paint? charcoal? ink? graphite?) I'd use, and so on and so forth. And this, for me, is where the photography comes in, as life rarely provides the occasion to stay in one spot for hours.
So this weekend, I went out with Ashley and Chris, a couple of friends who actually know what they're doing, so that they could teach me to at least try to suck a little less at this whole thing. They were magnificently patient with me, and the pictures I took (while still being hilariously childish) turned out better than I expected. I fully anticipated a bunch of blurry, dark, blue rectangles to come out of my efforts. It occurred to me later that I definitely should have put together a socks/sandals/hawaiian-shirt/bucket-hat outfit to make it obvious to everyone in the vicinity exactly what level I'm on, but I'll just have to count that as a missed opportunity.
Some disclaimers/excuses:
1) I didn't even try to take any pictures of anything that was moving.
2) I'm only going to post the halfway decent photos on here, because, I mean jeez, d'ya think I'm stupid?
3) We went in the evening, during the "golden hour," which means that everything was gorgeous, and the brick walls I was pointing my lens at were kind of hard to mess up. But I definitely still managed to do so.
4) The settings on my camera were magically set so that I barely had to do anything to them. As it started to get dark, I had to fiddle with it a little bit, but not much. There are some settings I could have (and probably should have) messed with, but I chickened out a little bit. Namely, Ashley was encouraging me to try lowering the f-stop (aperture), so that the backgrounds of the photos would appear more blurred. As I said, I totally chickened out of messing with it. We didn't have much time before it got dark, and I was terrified of spending fifteen minutes squawking "WHY IS EVERYTHING ORANGE AND UPSIDE DOWN." (These are the problems I have.)
This is the first photo I took, just to see where things were. Like I said, I was lucky to find out that most of my settings were about where they need to be-ish.
Also, I have done zero editing on any of these pictures. Some of 'em need a good cropping, but I'm letting them rest in all their meh-ish glory.
Also, I have done zero editing on any of these pictures. Some of 'em need a good cropping, but I'm letting them rest in all their meh-ish glory.
I was super excited about this tree root for awhile. It's just goin nuts all over the place there.
Then there were some super wonky windows. Ooh aah.
And the sky was a pretty blue. I had that going for me.
At one point we were on this landing thing above a courtyard, and I saw this goofy dog chilling in the grass below. It wasn't until after I took the picture that I realized what was going on... That, friends, is a pooping dog.
I was pretty excited about this picture as well. I thought that the single light on in the building was just so cool, man... But the more I look at it, the more I see all the other random crud all over the place. Electric lines, and the photobombing street light... Merp.
The sky was gorgeous, if nothing else.
Also, the road we were on crossed over these, I wasn't gallivanting around on railroad tracks, so just cool your jets.
Also, the road we were on crossed over these, I wasn't gallivanting around on railroad tracks, so just cool your jets.
Here's another image I was at least sort of proud of. I didn't notice until I got home and was loading them onto the computer that it's another one with just one light on in the building. Makes me want to go around taking pictures of buildings that have only one light on... My idea, you can't steal it. (You're free to laugh at me, though, that's fine.)
For this one, I didn't even care about taking a decent picture. I just thought the cloud was funny looking, like it's peeking up over the darker cloud to decide whether or not it's safe to come out. Or maybe it's scared of the dark.
Aaaaaaaaand this is the last one I took. It was getting dark, and my panic about messing with the settings is evident.
So ta daa!!! and lol and so much more. Since I knew that my lighting and such would more likely than not be terribly off for awhile, I at least tried to put a decent amount of thought into the composition of the image (because I wanted to at least pretend I knew what I was doing). This didn't always pan out, and there's not a single picture here that makes me think, "Well, shoot. Someone was thinkin' about their composition there." Composition, if it's not a term your familiar with, refers to the arrangement of elements in the image, at least in reference to 2D stuffs. So I was thinking about how much space a certain part of the image would take up, where things would bleed out of the picture, trying to avoid tangents (places where lines of separate objects line up and create confusion - I did a terrible job of this), and hoping to create an image that's more than just a, "Well... yeap, that's a picture of a building."
So will I be trying stuff like this again? Absotutely! Hopefully I'll end up with some good reference photos for the million things I want to paint. Will they be monumentally fabulous examples of photography? Definitely not. But I can have fun trying.
But most importantly... lolololol at the pooping dog.
Thanks,
Sarah
So ta daa!!! and lol and so much more. Since I knew that my lighting and such would more likely than not be terribly off for awhile, I at least tried to put a decent amount of thought into the composition of the image (because I wanted to at least pretend I knew what I was doing). This didn't always pan out, and there's not a single picture here that makes me think, "Well, shoot. Someone was thinkin' about their composition there." Composition, if it's not a term your familiar with, refers to the arrangement of elements in the image, at least in reference to 2D stuffs. So I was thinking about how much space a certain part of the image would take up, where things would bleed out of the picture, trying to avoid tangents (places where lines of separate objects line up and create confusion - I did a terrible job of this), and hoping to create an image that's more than just a, "Well... yeap, that's a picture of a building."
So will I be trying stuff like this again? Absotutely! Hopefully I'll end up with some good reference photos for the million things I want to paint. Will they be monumentally fabulous examples of photography? Definitely not. But I can have fun trying.
But most importantly... lolololol at the pooping dog.
Thanks,
Sarah