week three: depth of field assignment

I went to the Lincoln Park Conservatory with someone from class. We shot for about an hour and a half, trying to get good examples of different depths of field.

It's easier to take pictures of plants than people since they stay pretty still, but I struggled to take a photo that I liked. It all looked a little hallmark-ish until I started looking at the plants a bit more closely. I tried to capture the textures I saw on the bark of the different kinds of trees and vines.

A (fellow CPCer) wasn't too excited about what she shot, but I think she's just a little hard on herself. We did get some good examples of depth of field.

We think.

Here are a few of my favorite photos from our shoot:

[shallow depth of field]


[greater depth of field]


[extremely shallow depth of field]


[shallow depth of field]

week three

Tonight we learned about making proof sheets for our photos. We went up into the lab and figured out how to use the printers and talked about Tree House (the upstairs lab at CPC) etiquette. We'll be using the lab once a week to work on and print images.

Some of the people in class aren't that comfortable with computers (and for us Mac users, the PCs required a refresher), but by the end of the lab session, we'd basically got the naming, indexing, and archiving processes down.

This week we're shooting photos that explore depth of field choices. I've never been to the Lincoln Park Conservatory, so I am thinking I'll go there to shoot.

week two: motion assignment

I was out in Seattle this past weekend for a wedding, so I took a walk by myself around downtown and looked for motion. Birds were mentioned as being illegal subjects for this assignment (because they are small and composition tends to go out the window when you're shooting something that fast-moving), but I couldn't resist taking a few photos of a pigeon building a nest in the sign for an old ramshackle hotel.

One thing I hadn't realized was how many photos I'd have to take to get the photo I wanted. I have a whole card filled with these pigeons. And I'm still not quite sure whether the blurring I captured was due to motion, and not to the subject being out of focus.

[stopped motion]


[pigeon out of focus]


[some motion blurring]

week two

Tonight we learned about shutter speed and how to use the length of time the shutter is open to get different results. This week we'll be trying to stop motion and show motion (as a blur).

A few of the students went out after class and I joined them. When I carry my camera, everything looks like a good photo op.

Here a two shots I took while we were hanging out:

week one: 512MB assigment

I went to Forest Home Cemetary to take some photos for our first assignment. It had just rained and so I slogged through the mud and around the gravestones hoping to find interesting angles and perspectives. I felt a little uncomfortable when a funeral procession went by and I was snapping photos of old grave headstones.

Here are a few of my favorites from the trip: