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.