Art Final

f/4.0

iso200

aperture 1/640

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

iPhone 6s Plus

f/5.6

iso400

aperture 1/2000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

 iso/400

f/6.3

1/4000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

iso/100

f/6.3

1/4000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

iso/3200

f/4.0

30second exposure

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

iso/200

f/4.5

1/2000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon 30-700 Lens

iso/1600

f/8.0

1/3200

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon 30-700 Lens

iso/800

f/5.6

1/4000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon 30-700 Lens

iso/100

f/25

1/15

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon 30-700 Lens

 iso/400

f/5.6

1/4000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon 30-700 Lens

iso/1600

f/4.5

1/4000

 Canon Rebel T3i with Canon 30-700 Lens

iso/400

f/5.6

1/2500 

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon 30-700 Lens

iso/1600

f/5.6

1/4000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon 30-700 Lens

f/5.6

iso200

aperture 1/640

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

f/5.6

iso200

aperture 1/640

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

f/5.6

iso400

aperture 1/2000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

f/5.6

iso400

aperture 1/2000

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

f/4.0

iso200

aperture 1/640

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

f/4.0

iso200

aperture 1/640

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

f/4.0

iso200

aperture 1/640

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

f/4.0

iso200

aperture 1/640

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

iPhone

iPhone 6s Plus

iso/3200

f/4.0

30second exposure

Canon Rebel T3i with Canon Efs 18-355mm Lens

Entry 14

I found this website: http://www.featureshoot.com/ and I actually really enjoyed it.

It's been marketed as a photography inspiration website, but also offers great suggestions into improving techniques, new trends, and the like.

I still have about 10 pictures to get for my final, and might use some of the tricks they listed here in my exploration.

Share 2 and Critique 4

I chose this picture because I like the water droplets flying in the air around the buffalo.

I chose this picture because I like the blue of the water in it. 

Entry 13: Weekly Blog Post

I had no idea what to post today for my blog. I was scrolling through some of my Yellowstone pictures and found this one, which is a closeup I shot when I got bored was waiting to go back to the van and saw a fly land on a sagebrush. In short: (1) I am not skilled enough to take a closeup shot of a fly in a short amount of time and (2) I really should have tried not being bored and taking more pictures of buffalo than plants. This being said, I really like how this shot turned out.

Share and Critique 3

I have a bunch of Yellowstone pictures to go through, so I figured a share and critique would be a good spot to use more of them. I like the first picture because the sky ends up (to me at least) being the focal point rather than the geyser, and the clouds looked kind of cool.

ISO: 400

Aperture: 5.6

Shutter Speed: 1/4500

This photo, I mostly just wanted to see what I could do with Lightroom and had some fun experimenting. 

ISO:400

Aperture: 5.6

Shutter Speed: 1/2500

Entry 12: Weekly Blog Post

For my weekly blog post, I'm including an article I found in Buzzfeed yesterday of National Geographic's Nature Photography Photos of the year.

My favorite photo was this one, in part because the image portrayed the ever prevalent bison in the park in a new and unique way.

Likes:

• Focus is on tree with bison in background
• Photo structure: tree's unique features draw your eye into the bison
• Black and white edit makes the fog look more intense

Dislikes:

• There are a few trees in the background that could have been edited out

Here are the rest of the photos, but I wanted to focus on this one.

Entry 11: Regular Blog

Through the course of this class, I have run into one issue consistently: Photo Storage. 

Granted, I should have expected this, I have a 2013 Macbook Air running an 1.3Ghz i5 Core with an 128GB SSD, with 4GBS of RAM. 

 In other words, not a computer meant to store lots of RAW files. 

In my frustration of discovering that I couldn't actually store any files on my computer to edit, I became creative, and did my research.

Ultimately, I landed on temporarily using Google Photos associated with my RMC Google account (lots of storage included), and I have the option to upload "original, RAW" files enabled. 

I could have juggled an external hard drive, flash drives, etc., and as my job is in IT, I have a lot of these devices hanging around, but I've discovered a central issue with external devices: I lose them. All of the time. 

Given this, cloud storage seemed like the best alternative until I can upgrade my computer.

Although I still have storage issues on my computer(Lightroom is a HUGE application) , landing on Google Photos has saved a lot of frustration in figuring out what I'm deleting off of my Mac next. 

Critique and Share 2: Yellowstone Trip

This class is going to be the end of my laptop. I came home with 19gbs of photos following Yellowstone, and am in the midst of finding space on my computer to put them all to edit.

Anyway.

The first photo was actually the first picture I took of the day. I love sunrise pictures, and the clouds turned out really cool in this.

ISO: 800

Shutter Speed: 1/400

Aperture: 5.6

This picture was a random shot I took this weekend.  I liked how the reflection looked in the water.

ISO: 800

Shutter Speed: 1/4000

Aperture: 6.3

I still have about 800 pictures following the trip to go through, so I'm sure there are better ones, but I'm happy with the way both of these turned out. 

Entry 10: Weekly Blog Post

A few weeks ago, I spent the day in Cody, and took the Chief Joseph highway as a slight detour on the way there.

I love getting outside and exploring, and that day was no different, minus the fact I spent the remainder of the time kicking myself that I hadn't brought a "real camera". I'm including one of the pictures I took on my iPhone as a lame example of what I could have captured if I hadn't left my Canon at home.

Irritation aside, the Chief Joseph highway is fantastic, and I love the opportunity to get outside of Billings and escape homework for a bit.

Both of these pictures have the potential to be improved upon, and plan on editing them later on in Lightroom.

Entry 9: Weekly Blog Post

Our group has been working a lot at getting our project done. I'm currently working with McKenna on logistics and hopefully will be finished shortly with the entire project.

Currently, we're looking at flights, food, gear, etc., cost. Several of the "tours" we want to take already have food, lodging, and travel included in the cost, so that makes things easier.

Current expedition thoughts: here and here.

Although I currently cannot afford to go on a trip to these places, I've always wanted to, and this is making me want to save my money to go explore them.

Entry 8: Weekly Blog Post

For this week's required post, I'm sharing another picture I had fun messing around with.
I'm still getting to know Lightroom, and I thought it would be fun to play with my ever-frustrating iPhone pictures on the software.

I was actually quite surprised, and love the results of the picture post edits.

I went rock climbing in Cody this past weekend, and it was overcast, rainy, and snowing not that far above where our group was. The clouds were fantastic, and I didn't have  a camera other than my phone's to use, so I hoped for the best. I think it actually turned out pretty well. Editing wise, I really just increased the intensity of a few colors as well as a few other basic edits we learned last week. I was happily surprised with how the picture turned out, and may possibly recant my disdain for iPhone pictures.

Assignment:Photo Critique

I found out in class today (yesterday at this point?) that the Northern Lights would be pretty fantastic to photograph tonight. As I didn't want to go alone, I grabbed my sister and we headed for our old stomping grounds.

Growing up in Broadview, we spent a lot of time exploring Molt, side roads, the Buffalo Trail, and any random ranch road we could reasonably get our "definitely not for off roading" Honda Civic down. Aside from nearly getting stuck in ruts along wheat fields several times, the experience was well worth it, and knowing these back roads made tonight all the more worthwhile.

I've chosen three pictures that I took tonight for my post for critique, and have attached them below. The settings necessary to accomplish both of these pictures unfortunately caused a lot of quality to be lost.  For all the camera was set to the following:

Shutter Speed: 30" (long exposure) (without tripod, unfortunately)
Aperture: 4.5
ISO: 1600
Location: Polpelka Rd, outside of Molt, MT 

After long bouts of struggle, the picture I have listed first turned out. Nobody was moving (my sister thought there was a coyote moving close to us and stopped moving out of hopes that it wouldn't see us), and we finished up pretty well. This picture is the least grainy, shows the lights the best, and really was a encouraging image to come to when editing all of the pictures tonight. 

I am obsessed with the second picture, actually. My sister was taking a long exposure shot of the northern lights with her new camera, and I had been instructed to "Hold still or so help me I will end you", so when I discovered a car coming towards us, I took the opportunity to hold still and be productive. I love that there are two lights (not sure why, but it looks cool), that you can see the rows of the harvested wheat, and that the light has cast a glow around the picture. Of the pictures I took tonight, this one is definitely my favorite.

The last picture is great, albeit low quality due to the settings needed to achieve everything happening in it. I was able to capture both the Northern Lights and Big Dipper, but had some focus issues due to the fact that it was pitch black outside. We ended up discovering after the first round of pictures that we could use the house light as a target to focus on, then move to taking pictures elsewhere. However, I love how the lights look in this picture. 

Overall, I'm glad I sacrificed my sleep for pictures tonight. While the quality is still pretty grainy, I'm glad I was able to see the Northern Lights. 

Entry 7: Assignment- Normal Blog

As we're starting to learn more about lightroom in class, I thought it would be pertinent for my post for this week to focus on lightroom. I found this really cool tutorial here that includes a video giving a basic overview of lightroom-- hopefully it will play in well with what we're learning in class.

My knowledge of lightroom is limited to watching my sister learning it, seeing her yelling at her computer as she learned keyboard shortcuts, inadvertently changed settings with an unknown shortcut, and learned what she could do to make her pictures look better.

It would be nice to avoid the "yelling at computer stage", so I'm hoping to learn this as best as I can.

Entry 6: Assignment- 2 Photos

For class today we were to take two photos using two techniques listed in the text.

I chose: "difference draws more attention than conformity and jagged lines are more striking than curved ones" (p.101)

I'm still not completely confident in using the "fancy" camera, but I'm starting to like the results more.

Picture One: "Jagged lines are more striking than curved ones"
 Settings:

Shutter Speed:1/800

Aperture: 2.8

ISO: 200

Picture Two:"Difference draws more attention than conformity"

Settings:

Shutter Speed: 1/400

Aperture: 6.3

ISO: 400

Entry: 5 :Red in Photography

In class on Tuesday we discussed how red is a color that is often the first thing you notice in a photograph. In looking for inspirations for my own photo for our other assignment, I found this picture on the North American Nature Photography Association's website.

The thing I immediately noticed about the picture (probably in part due to our classtime on Tuesday) was the bright red on the bird's wing tips. In an otherwise pretty grey photo, they were the first things my eyes went to, along with the bird's bright yellow tail. Unfortunately, I don't know that I would have the patience to capture a picture such as this one. When taking pictures, I tend to get "click happy" for five minutes, get cold/ready to do something else and miss the chance to get something cool like a bird eating a berry.  I'm excited for our trip to Yellowstone to hopefully force myself to sit still and watch nature.

Entry 4: Adventure Photography Planning

I started thinking about where I could have a photography adventure trip (per our assignment that is coming up), and I started looking into trips that could be a possibility.

After watching a documentary on a mountaineering disaster a few years ago, I became infatuated with the mountains. Disaster documentary after disaster documentary,  I slowly fell in love with the idea of mountain climbing, but more over the idea of photographing the epic mountains.

Given my love of all things Everest, I started googling adventure trips for photography surrounding Everest and found this article. http://www.outsideonline.com/1854381/best-adventure-photography-trips-mount-everest-base-camp-nepal

For $4000 (in 2009), I could go to the base of the mountain, take pictures of the mountain from a safe distance (without having to get in enough shape to summit), and have food provided.

I'll be looking into other options, but a trip to Everest is beginning to tempt me.

Entry 3: Two Photos (Tuesday Assignment)

This was not fun on an iPhone. I had all of these grandiose ideas of how I'd be able to jump outside and tap the area of the phone that I wanted in focus and it'd be all fun and nice looking.

Fun fact: That only works on certain subjects. I finally found success on taking two pictures of  pine needles, but this was after searching around campus for twenty minutes taking pictures of various objects.

Lessons learned:
1. Use actual camera for future assignments
2. Abandon thoughts of taking beautiful iPhone pictures without downloading a bunch of apps.

Picture 1: Central subject is in focus and background is out of focus. ( I would give specific settings used for these, but as it was taken on my iPhone, it was really just tapping a specific spot in the screen)

Picture 2: Everything is in focus. 

Entry 2: Phipps Park

Phipps Park has been home to me for a long time. I've spent summers bouldering there, hiking, folfing-- basically anything I can do outside, I'm at Phipps.

My sister and I came up tonight and explored a bit (she's never been there somehow... mostly due to a "Mountain Lion Phobia" that comes up occasionally), and I tried my hand as an iPhone-ographer.


While I'm not entirely thrilled with the quality of the images, a few turned out well enough to put a blog post up about.

First, I love sagebrush. We grew up Antelope hunting, and so sagebrush really just brings back early morning prairie hunting adventures with my father.

Next, I mostly just love the view this picture provides. It wasn't quite the whole way up the trail, but we stopped for a minute to look at everything, and naturally, phones were taken out to snap a few pictures.

Finally, my sister was taking a picture of a pinecone, and I thought it was a cool angle, juxtaposing nature with technology with human with nature back again in the background.

I love this place. 

Entry 1: Exposure 2016

Outside magazine is one of my favorite things to read. Growing up in Billings and more so, my childhood home of Broadview, I've been somewhat inundated since day one with Mountains, Climbing, Hunting, anything outside in general. I found this post by Outside Magazine showcasing the "best adventure photography" of 2016, and I was not disappointed.

Aside from my inherent inability to operate a camera beyond that of an iPhone, this article made me want to drop everything, head out to the middle of nowhere (which isn't difficult in this particular locale), and explore.

Montana is an incredible place to live, but this article reminded me that there is so much out there beyond the 406. Although there are some limitations to my achieving something of the caliber of photographs in this post (money, massive amounts of inexperience, lack of time, what have you), the images within this beckon me to abandon all responsibility and attack the outdoors-- one shot at a time.