Everything tagged photography
I've started playing around with Photoshop to enhance my photos. I was looking at the wedding photos done by the professional they hired for my cousin's wedding. They were fantastic. You can view them here: Kellie and Paul's Wedding. Her composition is excellent, the pictures are sharp, and she certainly gets a great sense of playfulness from her subjects.
I just finished taking a month long photography class. I had been talking to my friend, Tom, about my photography skills. I felt that after I got a high-end DSLR camera, that my photos actually got worse. I had no idea what all the buttons were for. Every time I tried to figure out f-stop and shutter speed, I'd take lousy photos. I really needed a class to get me into shape. We looked at a few classes in the city. In the end, we took a "Digital Photography Workshop" from NYU. The instructor was Emmanuel Faure (http://www.emmanuelfaure.com/).
It took me a while to post these, but here are photos from our first photo walk. We took a stroll around Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building.
Here are photos from our second photo walk. This walk was done in and around Bryant Park. The clouds were wreaking havoc with our settings, so we had to be nimble - and many of my photos came out too dark.
This week was tough. We had a guest teacher - someone whose name I can't remember. He is a famous street photographer. He gave us his general philosophy about photography and especially street photography. For instance, he suggested that once we feel like we have the shot, step into it the shot by taking a step 1 - 2 feet forward. It makes a big difference. All of a sudden, you feel close to your subject.
This week, our assignment for class was to photograph food. He gave us the general guideline of using natural light in the background and a reflector in the front to capture the light. I think I did pretty well at getting the subject to really pop with the reflector. I took some shots without the reflector for comparison and they came out a little too contrast-y - and not in a good way. The reflector gave the food a nice glow to it.
For our final class, we went mostly indoors. We went to the apartment of one of the class members for some experiments in indoor portrait work and then some night shots from her balcony.
David got me a new camera - a Konica Minolta DSLR, with a wide-angle lens. Although these aren't as extreme as I was hoping to get, I still had fun. Here are some shots of the dogs with a wide angle lens.
I'm a bit behind on my posts about photography class. Week 6 was all about black and white photography. I was hoping to bring in some male nudes, but all of my friends were shockingly prudish! I'm trying to figure out if that's because in the age of the internet, people just don't want someone to take nude photos of them. Or perhaps none of my friends trust me. Or perhaps the younger generation just isn't as comfortable stripping for art. Hmmm...
I missed the 4th week of photography class, so I'll jump right into week 5. This week in class, we started using soft boxes - which are big boxes of fabric you put over a light to direct all the light in one direction. There's a flat white part where the light emits, which diffuses the light.