Our Life in Alaska and Beyond

I've been taking a photography course for babies and children through Nicole's Classes. It's supposed to be a two week course, but I kinda crashed through it all in two days, lol. It was fun and I learned a few tips and tricks for how to take better pics of kids. It was a little more basic than I was expecting, but it was still fun to put my camera to good use and get some cute pics of our girls, and a few kids in the neighborhood. :)

We had a couple of "creative shoot" assignments. This was a pretend ad for Gerber, lol.

This is the last and final week of Photo 101 of Nicole's Classes. I have learned so much and I'm so glad I took this course. I still feel like I need a lot more practice to really get comfortable shooting in manual mode, but this course has helped so much. This last week (week 4) I feel was especially helpful. We learned different ways to best use the lighting. Living here in Alaska we are already starting to lose our daylight fast, and it's getting so cold, but I was still able to get a few good shots. :)

Lighting Demo: Front lighting w/ diffusion. I didn't have an assistant so I had one hand on my camera and the other hand holding the poster board. You can see the shadow from the poster on Scott, whoops, haha.

This is what I've been learning from Nicole's Classes in the Photo 101 class. I got a little behind and did week 3 and week 4 at the same time, but I'll separate them into separate posts, as we learned different things each week. Week 3 was all about Posing/Head Positions and Lighting Patterns. It was all very new and foreign to me, so it took a little bit of thinking to get the right shot. I'm still not very familiar with it, but it was fun to learn. I think I'll always prefer taking more candid shots, but I had fun with it. Thanks to Scott and Ruby for being such great models!

Posing and Head Positions: Mug, straight on

In week two of Photo 101 of Nicole's Classes we learned about elements of composition (how to make our photos more appealing), White Balance (using the presets to balance the colors), and all about different lenses. When I bought my camera (Canon Rebel T3i) I bought the body only and then a used lens on Craigslist. The lens I use is a 28-135 mm which allows for me to take a wide variety of photos. I'd like to keep getting more comfortable with my lens and camera and then maybe upgrade to a nicer lens.

Rule of Thirds - Not placing the eyes in the very center, although I feel the window in the background is distracting

I decided to learn how to use my DSLR a little better and I signed up for a class with Nicole's Classes.  I'm taking the Photo 101 class. I'm still getting starting and getting used to how the class works, but I love it so far and I feel like I'm already learning a lot. Let's hope we can see some improvement in my picture taking skills. I'll be posting my work here each week for four weeks. This first week we learned all about the basics. All these pics were taken in Manual Mode!

Capturing Action, Fast Shutter Speed