Through My Lens - Class 1

Photography (Greek) : to write light.  Photo means light and graph means write. 

Last night I went to my first ever photography class. I've been waiting for this night since Christmas morning - a present from Beth. I've had a keen interest for photography since 2004, when I received my first camera. My camera is with me at all times no matter where I am going. You never know when a photo opportunity will arise. The thing is though, despite living my life through a camera lens (when I'm not living it through paint and canvas haha), I have yet to learn about the technical side to photography. I just turn my camera on and snap to my hearts content. Luckily my past two cameras have had wonderful automatic settings on them, just turn the dial. When I purchased my new camera I quickly realized it's a bit of a hunt to find the automatic settings, and I'm not one for instruction manuals or the like. So the timing of this class was perfect.

There are four of us in the class. Myself, Beth, Karen T, and a gentleman from out of town. With six classes in total, we meet for about 2 hours. In this time we go over the language of photography, the technical aspects, and then go out and take some pictures. We end the class by reviewing each others photos.

We first examined our cameras, checked out the icons, and learned the importance of using the viewfinder. As silly as it sounds, I found this helpful. I RARELY use my viewfinder. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there were cobwebs on it haha. If the light of outdoors makes my screen dark, I photograph blindly, and hope for the best. I've lucked into a few great pictures that way...but I've also missed out on lots of photos this way. By default, my arms are stretched out so I can see the screen, which means shaking arms and a few extra blurry photos. Turns out, when you use the viewfinder, you have your arms tucked into you, creating a human tripod, which steadies the camera - *the more you know*. I was just soaking up this information, it's going to change my photography experience. I also know now what aperture means, and understand what speeds are best for particular pictures (ex; portrait, landscape, moving subject matter). We also discussed focus light, angles, frame, perspective, and details. I was amazed at the overlapping between drawing/painting and the terminology covered here tonight. Sure makes it easy to catch on.  The subject for this class was architecture, so when we 'went out into the field' for 20 minutes, we focused on the historical buildings on one of the main streets. Keeping in mind of what Joan has taught us, I changed my ISO to 100 (for better detail), had my F-Stop at 3.2 (because we couldn't figure out how to change it on my camera, I'll have to Google that after) and started getting as many pictures in as I could during the 20 minutes we had. Once I hear that first click, it's so hard to stop taking pictures.

This is what I saw through my lens

Our homework is to bring in a photo we have taken before of a building that we would want to enlarge to a 16x20 and then to take a new photo using our skills we learned tonight. You know what this means....an adventure is awaiting me!