Photography Assignment - Chapter 2 (and new lens!!!)

Okay I am seeeeriously excited!!! I have been chatting with Rebecca, one of my lovely friends through my blog from a long while back now, who has also taken up photography in the last year, and is taking BEAUTIFUL photos of her little ones now! Well, chatting through Facebook - she lives in Australia! :) She has been answering a bunch of questions about some of the technical aspects of her photos. I have now read through Chapter Two (depth of field and selective focus) of my photography book, and have also done the assignment for that chapter (I think!). I've just started reading Chapter Three, which is about light and exposure - exciting!! So I'm here to post photos for the depth of field and selective focus stuff, but I also have exciting news (well, for me, anyway!)!

I have been wondering about buying a different lens for my camera recently. Just a little wondering in the back of my mind, nothing huge or a major craving or anything! ;) But the majority of the photos in the book I have were taken using a lens with a much wider aperture than the ones I have. I have a twin lens kit with my Sony Alpha 300 DSLR, and kit lenses aren't usually that great if you want to get more serious about photography. I have actually only used one of them anyway! The one I haven't used is HUGE and has more zoom. I am more interested in macro photography, well, portrait-style photography - not requiring a big distance zoom. I have begun to wonder about buying a lens that will complement and enhance that type of photography to give me even better photographs. I have trouble with low light a lot because our house is tiny and not well lit with outside light (small windows, ugh!), and I take almost all my photos indoors at the moment, due to it being impossible to juggle all my little ones out of doors at the same time as being a photographer! ;) NOT that I'm giving myself such a grand title. Yet! ;) But you know, it's impossible really. I did try when Neil and I took them to the park last weekend, but it's winter and freezing cold, and they're all covered up in thick layers, heads and all! So not good for beautiful photographs. I can't wait for spring!

Anyway, so the long and short of it is, I wanted to buy a 50mm lens with an f-stop of less than 2.0, ideally. I can't believe I even know what these things mean, lol! ;) It's exciting to me! I really knew nothing at all ever so recently! I discovered that Sony DSLR cameras are compatible with the old Minolta SLR lenses!! So I searched eBay and found some! The Sony lenses are hundreds of pounds!!! Yikes! I bid on a 50mm 1.7 Minolta lens at eBay last night (excellent condition) and WON!!! So I have a new lens coming, and I'm unnaturally excited, haha! ;) I can't believe I'm this excited about a lens, and I'm thrilled that I'm so excited about photography, because it is a good sign that maybe I WILL get good at it, if I'm this motivated? It's my birthday next weekend and I know my parents will give me a specific amount of money. The lens I bought was almost exactly what they'll give me, so I'm really happy about that! :) The new lens will help with the light issues (being a larger aperture it will let more light into the camera for my photographs), and also help with selective focus/depth of field, like the assignment I've been working on this past week.

I am REALLY enjoying this assignment, and just playing around with it! I have been working with my camera in Aperture Priority mode the whole time, as the book suggested, setting my f-stop at 3.5 (which is the lowest my current kit lens will go) for the best result (sharp subject focus, blurry background). It has been so much fun, and I think the photos look better than previous ones I've been taking because of it.

The assignment was to try to take a beautiful photograph with selective focus. I figured "beautiful" would have to mean "outdoors" but I just couldn't get a chance to do that, so I took some photos of Benjamin indoors and tried to do the best I could in terms of making him "sharp" and the background "soft". This was my favourite - I haven't altered it at all for this blog (I did alter it for my main blog when I posted it there, just brightened it and increased the saturation a bit), so it's rather dark, but that's the old low light issue that I'm forever irritated by in my living room! Anyway, this was my best result for the assignment:



I wanted to write a post with a bunch of photographs to show my other attempts, because I've had a few little sessions over the week, but I haven't got time to post more photos at the moment. I might try later, but I have already started on Chapter Three, and am discovering there are a few mini assignments scattered throughout the chapter, so I want to get cracking on those! I took photos of Benjamin today to try out some of the things I'm learning about light (that's what Chapter 3 is about), and I'm excited about what I'm doing, so I will probably want to post those soon instead! I just want to devour this photography book lately! I'm so excited to see my photographs improving!! :)

Photography Assignment - Chapter One!

It's soooo time I caught up and got back to this blog properly! And I really really want to improve at taking photographs. A while ago (before Benjamin was born in July), I had a book which I planned to work through, called "Photographing Children" (a Photo Workshop book) by Ginny Felch and Allison Tyler Jones. I like it because each chapter teaches new things, and at the end of each chapter there is an assignment. In Chapter One, there was a creative exercise mid-way through the chapter, to make a photograph out of a list of subjects. I worked on that for ages, and have posted the results of that exercise here already.

The actual assignment for the end of Chapter One was to create a children's portrait that reflects something of what your style is, and who YOU are, having learned a little about style and creativity in the chapter. I took a photo in early September (ages ago, I know!) that I posted at my main blog, and that was the one I wanted to post as my Chapter One assignment.

It's a photo of Nathan (19 months at the time) fairly close-up. He was playing with the soft toys on the sofa, and laughing and being gleeful. He LOVES soft toys and goes to bed with a whole armful of them! He names them and loves on them. I wanted to reflect something of his cheeky happiness with something he loves. Here's the photo, straight out of the camera. I am not crazy about the colour tone and would personally want to warm it up and maybe tweak the light/dark contrast thingy, but I want to post all my photos "raw", sort of, so that I can see more clearly where I'm improving in basically just taking photographs, over time. I took this photo in manual setting. I have no idea how to find out now what the more specific details of the settings were, but Chapter Two takes me through that kind of learning, so I'll know more about that after I do that chapter.



I'm starting to work through Chapter Two, and learning lots as I go along, having been a complete novice to start with! I can't help but learn stuff if I knew nothing to start with! ;) So as soon as I get chance I will do the assignment at the end of Chapter Two, and then move on to Chapter Three! :) I am excited to improve and learn more, and get some nice photos of my little ones in the process!

Blog neglect!! :S

Oops, six month gap there! I didn't mean that to happen, but I have been busy since Benjamin was born (July 9th!). I also lost my photography book for the first 4 months after Benjamin's arrival, as my room was cleared out in a hurry for my homebirth and I didn't oversee the stashing of things, being somewhat preoccupied (!), so it vanished and I couldn't do any of the assignments therefore.

But now I've found it, hooray! I just haven't had chance to read another chapter and figure out the next assignment. I will get to it soon, hopefully. I'm reading the Bible in 90 days till the end of March and that takes up a good lot of my precious spare time so I don't know if I will manage to read and learn about photography till that is finished. We'll see.

I have been taking loads of photos though! And experimenting with the camera. I never ever put it in auto mode. Ever. Or use a flash. I have it in manual mode, and have learned to fiddle with the ISO and whatever that other thing is whose name escapes me at the moment (F stop or something?!!?) as I take photos, and also the white balance. I only discovered the white balance settings a couple of months ago, for some reason! I still haven't read the whole camera manual though.

I took some photos of rain and snow from the window (some with little ones in them) over the last couple of months that I should have posted here. The rain ones I posted on my usual blog in November, the day I took them. I think I will link it here because that's the easiest way of "posting" the pictures: http://arthursmummy.blogspot.com/2009/11/lovely-rainy-day.html. I meant to post them at both blogs because they were definitely photos that were taken with photography in mind, if you know what I mean, rather that just a snap or to record something my kids were doing. I played about with the settings and the light on many of the photos, and I took lots and lots of photographs! I was really pleased with the way some of them came out, especially the rainbow ones.

In December (and January!) it snowed, and I took some photos of the children watching the snow fall. I tried experimenting with the settings again and took lots of different photos - most samey and plenty that were no good in the end, but again it was focusing on "photography" so I wanted to post them here. I still haven't uploaded them though, so I will try to do that soon.

Recently I have been trying to get clear close-up shots of Benjamin (face mostly) with a soft blurred background, and I'm having mixed success so far. I must post some of those efforts too, but I'm already pretty behind on posting photos of all the children on my arthursmummy blog, so I need to do that first!

Will hopefully be back doing assignments here soon! I just thought I had better update! :)