Notes from my Photography Classes...

My foray into photography continues, people! Besides following the blog Katie Evans Photography, I also have her e-book. I'm also two classes into my four-class Groupon photo class extravaganza! The first, one of two with Anfinson Photography, was a review of basic photography followed by a walking tour of Old Folsom (no, that's not where the prison is). I took a few decent shots, like this one:

But for most of them, I forgot to adjust the manual settings, so the good photos were taken in the shade, and the blown-out photos were taken in the sun. The only way to save them was to Photoshop them into sub-par pop art:

 And this, which I think could be kind of interesting in the right context, like a postcard:

The next class was an advanced portrait class, which I found hard for a lot of reasons. One, I continued to shoot on manual while most of class, I learned later, shot on aperture priority, which is easier. Two, it's really awkward telling people how to pose, and I don't really like posed shots because they look posed. It's a bit too catch-22 for awkward little me. But my partner, Cassey, is gorgeous and looked so nice in every shot! And she was really good at posing herself, which would be awesome if I weren't trying to learn how to tell people to pose. I found myself just saying, "Yeah, so, pretty much just sit down. You look perfect. Maybe I'm just brilliant at this." 

Cassey was great, but my photos needed some tweaking. Like this one, where a column grows out of her head...

Or this one, where holding the sun reflector thingy makes her look like she has the world's worst spray tan. Yikes.

Here, I cut off her hands...

And then her feet...

We both really wanted to try to do sun flare shots. The instructor told us both to pose this way. Her photo of me looks so nice--she turned it black-and-white. I didn't think to put it in here...oh, well. Anyway, mine of her looks like she has sunshine coming out of a stoma in her neck:

I do also want to Photoshop out that tree coming out of her chest. The next day, I watched Katie's son Andy for a little. I asked him if he wanted to be a model, and he smiled like this:

The pics are a little yellower than I wanted, but I think I had my camera on the wrong white balance setting ("shade"). I've since turned it to "auto" just for ease. It's what the instructor told me to do. I like this next one because this to me is just who Andy is, happy and interested in everything, though the photo itself is a wee bit out of focus (babies move a lot!). The instructor told us to put ourselves between the light source (in my case, the bedroom windows) and the baby, and do everything you can to make the baby look at you, and hopefully smile!

That's all for now. I'll be in Alaska for a week with my mom, dad, brother, and Ellie, giving Mark a chance to come home every night and stare at the wall in peaceful, silent bliss. Peace out, and see you in a week!