We had our final photography lighting class. The assignment was quite open ended:
EVOKE AN EMOTION
It is now time to take all that you have learned up to this point and put it together into strong evocative images. Images that show you can control the mood and voice in your lighting technique.
No pressure.
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.
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.
The third week of photography lighting class, we worked on beauty lighting. We set up two stations with a tripod and a strobe light. We later added umbrellas to the mix to see how that affected things.
The first review of my homework for my photography lighting class went well. He gave me a specific challenge: to photograph objects instead of people. I clearly enjoy photographing people and he wanted us to start working outside of our comfort zone.
I came home from Israel with several goals. Most of the fitness goals are well in progress. I had also decided it was time to take a new class. I loved the photography class that I took at NYU, so I looked for a new class along those lines. I narrowed it down to a photographic lighting class and a portrait class. The lighting class seemed to have a more broader application, so I signed up for that.
I'm writing this from Israel. Once again, Israel has totally knocked my socks off, but in an entirely different way. When I was here before I was primarily struck by all the religious sites. This time, I'm struck more with the people. Israelis generally have the reputation of being loud and pushy people. Yes, that's true.
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.
I didn't come up with any great shots from this class, though I took the most photos from this class out of any of the others. Especially with the night shots, it was hard to determine how the shot was going to turn out. So there was a lot of trial and error.
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.
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.
We spent a lot of time working on portraiture in real light situations. Emmanuel showed us various lighting techniques, such as using a reflector. We also experimented with using slow shutter speeds around a fast moving subject for effect.
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. Our instructor, Emmanuel, would give us little assignments - such as "set your shutter speed to 1/250 and give me a reading as to what the aperture should be". On some assignments, he gave us all the settings and just told us to take pictures. That allowed us to see how the settings affected the quality of the photo and also to allow us to focus on composition.
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/).
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.
