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! :)

Reflection and Smooth

It's so late but I just had to post a sort of P.S. to the last entry here, to say that I did finally take a photograph to fit the two categories I missed from my first photography assignment. They are "reflection" and "smooth". The assignment is all about composition, not technical brilliance or anything, and while I attempted to compose the reflection one, it didn't turn out too well because it was blurry. I think I didn't have steady enough hands because it looks like the whole photo is blurry rather than just Nathan's movement. Oh well. I haven't got anything better, and I liked this photo for what it was, because Nathan was kissing himself in the mirror and being a cutie pie! :) So here's "reflection", blurry as it is:



And then for "smooth" I took a few photos of Nathan playing in the new pop up ball pit tent thingy I got for the boys recently. I was taking photos of them in there, and Nathan sat in the doorway at one point trying to ram a whole ball into his mouth while he gazed off somewhere (hopefully not the TV, but possibly!). It was too smooth for him to get a good bite on it, and that's when I realised I could photograph him doing that for the "smooth" category. So here it is:



Hooray! I completed an assignment! :) Now the next one is a portrait, just one single photograph, of one of my children. Or I guess a couple of them together? I don't know. I will have to re-read the chapter and see what the guidelines are, but I am not sure if I'll get to that before giving birth (3 days till my due date!). I'm eager to get further into this photography book though, so hopefully soonish!

Thanks for the encouraging comments here so far! I didn't really expect comments (or much interest at all really!) but they're helpful and encouraging and that's lovely! Thank you!

First Photography Assignment - at last!

It's been so long since I updated here, and although I was being relaxed about doing the photography assignments, what with a baby nearly due (38 weeks tomorrow!) and all, I DID still want to actually make progress on them! I still haven't quite finished the very first assignment, with all the different photos - the one about composition, or setting up a photo just from a creativity point of view (ie. never mind the poor quality of the photos!). But, I have done 12 out of 14, and so I think I will post them all now, and maybe just add those last two if I ever manage to get them done. I didn't get "reflection" or "smooth" done. I think I can get reflection done fairly easily because all I really need is a mirror and a child, or something like that! ;) I am getting very little time or energy to take photographs at the moment, and it has been that way for a few weeks, with the exception of Matthew's birthday and occasional photo opportunities with the little ones, but the assignment tasks just haven't been in my head to get completed.

Anyway, the assignment, which I've posted a couple of times in previous entries here, was to make 20 photographs out of the following 14 subjects, and include a child in each photograph:

An egg
Texture
Harsh light
Colour
Junk as art
Window
A face
Black
White
Shadow
Reflection
Round
Smooth
Partnership

I am supposed to just be creative in composing the photos, and let them reflect who I am in some way (easier said than done, I am discovering, since I have no idea HOW to let "me" flow through photographs yet! I guess this is something which will involve a lot of learning for me!). I am not supposed to worry about the quality of the photos or any sort of technical "well-done"-ness! Which is good because I am a TOTAL beginner! ;) But I have found it hard sometimes to not get a bit perfectionist-y about it and want to make it a "good" photo when I take one, and be a bit dissatisfied with the finished product if it isn't a "good" photo, instead of just being pleased that I've created another photograph from the list on my assignment. That's probably why it has taken me so long to get it all done!! Tsk. Anyway, here are the photos that I've done so far - I have got 17 photos for 12 subjects, which leaves me 3 photos still to take to make up my 20, and just 2 subjects left. That sounds doable! So here are the ones I have completed. I didn't edit them at all except to crop some of them, because I want to be able to see how improve as I work through the assignments over time and learn more about photography. Also, some of them "like the texture one" aren't too clear from the Blogger images as they are quite small, but they're HUGE when you click on them, so you can see the texture on the "texture" one, that I was trying to capture, when you click on it to make it bigger! ;)

An Egg - I took two:




Texture

This is a photo of Nathan touching the bricks on the wall in the back garden. I liked the texture of them and tried to capture that in the photo, but like I said, still very amateur! I like the texture of the fence against it too - a photo with a couple of different textures in it:



Harsh Light

Nathan at the window. I really like how this one came out. You wouldn't believe how many "harsh light" photos I tried over the weeks which were just not useable at all in the end! It was a harder subject than I thought.



Junk as Art

This one I took near the beginning of the assignment, and it seemed slightly lame to me, not awfully creative. But I couldn't think what to do for it, and the boys were playing with boxes that had just arrived with something or other in them that morning. They set up a "house" on the sofa and as I watched them play I realised I could possibly use a photograph of them doing that for the "junk as art" category. It's not art, but oh well! ;)



Window

I take a lot of photos of Nathan at the window, because he loves to be up there looking at the cars and cats and so on. It was the most obvious way to photograph this category, for me:



A Face

I have a million opportunities to take photographs of little faces! And I have a ton I could have used, but nothing out of the ordinary (which it didn't NEED to be, tsk!), until this one. I just like how Nathan's face is the only thing in proper focus, and I love the unusual expression! ;) He wasn't amazed, just making that face for some reason, looking off to the side there. I chose it for this category because it's a little bit different:



White

I took a ton of photos for the "white" category, which I was really pleased with, and couldn't resist posting the whole lot last entry! ;) So, they're all there if you're interested. But I chose two for the actual assignment:




Black

This one I found really difficult to be creative with. White was easy enough, but I just couldn't think what to do for black, and it's probably the one I ended up putting the most thought into therefore. Given that fact, I'm kind of disappointed with what I eventually came up with! ;) But oh well. We just don't have anything black at home at ALL really, which made it really hard. And I lately haven't been taking the boys out much at all, because I'm just huge and pregnant and tired, so we have not been getting to places where I might find something black to work with! I have two FlyLady black feather dusters, and decided to have Matthew peek out from those. He happened to be wearing the darkest top he owns (well, it's very dark brown, not black!) which helped, but it turned out too posed and so I wasn't really that pleased with it. Oh well. Here it is anyway - I haven't got anything else!



Round

I knew what I wanted for "round" pretty early on in the assignment, so this was taken near the beginning - a couple of my little boys beaming around my ROUND pregnant tummy! :) I guess I was about 33 or 34 weeks pregnant here. The photo quality is poor though, with the light and "noise", but I haven't changed anything about it except to crop it, like all the others for this assignment:



Partnership

I wanted to take a photo for this category of Arthur and Matthew, because they are best friends and real "partners" in so many things. I wanted to capture a moment of that for this category, and this is what I caught. They were playing in the garden and Matthew fell over on his ride-on digger. Arthur came right over to help him up, and I took a photo of my little boys in their moment of partnership! :)



Colour

I had so many ideas for this category, but lots of them didn't work out like I had hoped. I set up the one with the crayons, purposely, because I really wanted an eyeful of vibrant colour in the photo, and the crayons came to mind immediately. There IS a child in the photo (Nathan) but only his little hand :) It's a bit weirdly cropped because my hand was annoyingly in the edge of the photo, and I wanted to crop it out. Other than that I didn't change anything. A couple of weeks later I was randomly taking photos of all three boys drawing at the kitchen table, and I thought of using something for the "colour" category after a while, so took one of Arthur with the coloured pencils all in front of him as he was looking over them. So, I have two photos for the "colour" category:




Shadow

I found this a tricky category. Tons of opportunity to take photos with a shadowy influence (especially in our garden, as it's always partly in shadow), but so many of them were just not much good. Which I should not have been focusing on! And I'm not saying the ones I'm submitting for the assignment ARE good at all! But anyway, I found it hard to be happy with most of the shadowy photos I took. I finally got one of Nathan in shadow without it being basically just a too-dark photo, so I am using that one, and then I also took some photos of the boys eating rocket lollies on a warm afternoon, and they were in the shade and came out quite well for poor light (I used manual, not auto setting), so I'm using one of those too. So, two photos for the "shadow" category too:




Then I haven't done "reflection" or "smooth", and maybe I will never get around to it! I want to, and I really wish I had made more progress through the assignments by now, so that I was better at taking photos already in preparation for having a precious little newborn to photograph! But oh well. He's due ever so soon now, and we have so much still to get ready for his arrival, so I probably won't have time or energy to try to complete this assignment before he arrives, let alone start the next assignment (which is the official one at the end of Chapter One of my book - "Photographing Children"). All the assignments from now on will be single photographs. This was just a "something to try" box in the middle of the chapter, and I decided to work on it as an assignment. The proper assignments come at the end of each chapter, and they are all for ONE photo. The assignment at the end of Chapter One is to take a portrait of a child. It doesn't matter much what, why, when, or how. Or if it's any good! Just that there's some creativity put into it to reflect ME in my photography, and to make it unique to me therefore. I'm a bit daunted by that, because I am not sure how to make a photo unique from the zillions I've already seen, or how to feel satisfied with an actual "portrait" (yikes!) of one of my children. But I know that's just me being overly perfectionistic as I have a tendency to! ;) I'll have a go, anyway, and then I can move on and learn more about photography from Chapter Two, which I think is more about technical things that will improve my photographs and my understanding of how to take them - yay! I will have an extra little one to add to my photography subjects pretty soon, and I'm excited about that! :)

I will update again as I can!

White....

Okay, I know I was supposed to read a chapter of the Photographing Children book every Friday and then do the assignment over the week following (and post it here!), but I am not getting enough time to take photos with 3 little ones and being so pregnant (34 weeks now!). So I am just relaxed about it and not stressing - it's something that I can work at as slowly as I need to. The first assignment is a long one (not just one photo, but 20! In 14 different categories!), so it is taking me quite a while to check them all off and spend time thinking about what to do for each category. Some of them I am still stumped on! But I will get to them eventually. So far I have done:

An egg
Texture
Harsh light
Junk as art
Window
A face (though, I have tons of opportunity for this one and am not yet satisfied with what I've taken so far)
White
Round
Partnership

I have yet to figure out and photograph:

Colour
Black
Shadow
Reflection
Smooth

I want to at least TRY to do each category justice, even though it's not about a perfect "photo shoot" at this very very early stage of learning to take better photographs (as a COMPLETE amateur!), more about getting creative and thinking of ideas for settings and composing shots, etc. So I shouldn't get hung up on taking the perfect photo. But I struggle with not! I am NOT taking perfect photos, but I am starting to try new things as I work through this assignment over these past few weeks. I'm starting to use the manual setting more, though I mostly still shoot in auto. Manual usually gets me results that I'm not happy with, or that I can't "correct" very well on the computer, compared with the auto setting. BUT, I'm starting to see a tiny bit of improvement here and there, I guess just from practising - once or twice a shot hasn't satisfied me on auto so I have switched to manual, set the shutter speed and ISO (must be absorbing something from the photography book then, to know to do that?!) and taken a photo that's come out more pleasing to me, which is a REALLY satisfying feeling! I can see how it could become really addictive as I get better at it! :)

Today I thought out the "White" category for the photography assignment, and set it up really quickly and put the boys in the setting (every photograph has to include a child (or children)). I did some on auto setting and some on manual, because the light was strong and coming from the side (that's how our living room is laid out and the angle of our sofas to the light isn't ideal for taking photographs, but oh well). The manual ones came out too dark for my liking, and a bit "noisy" and grainy, but never mind. I am still not letting myself fix photos for these assignments on the computer - I have to post them straight out of the camera as I took them, except I will crop them. I want to see how I'm improving and I think that's a good way to see that clearly.

I am so pleased with some of the photos I took today - I surprised myself with some of them, because I'm really so amateur and if I ever use this scary piece of "grown-up" equipment to take a photograph and turn out one that I think is really nice, then I'm always surprised and pleased! Technically I'm sure they're not GREAT, but I'm so pleased with them anyway! There are way more than I can use for the category, because I really only have room for one or two photographs per category (14 categories, 20 photos in total). I have six or so that I really like, and because I'm really pleased with them I wanted to fix some of them to look even nicer after I saved the unchanged ones for the assignment. And I made a couple of them black and white to see how it looked. I just want to post all of them here, as part of my record of what I'm doing as I learn (and get results!).

My favourite (natural expressions!)! This was done in manual setting - here's the unchanged one. I planned to use this one for the photography assignment but after that, I uploaded the others that I took and now I'm not sure how to choose!



Loved it so much that I wanted to "fix" it for sending to family, Facebook, etc:



Here it is in black and white. I like the effect, and I'm not usually a fan of black and white (I prefer colour!):



I love this one of Arthur and Nathan, it's so cute! :) Matthew was in it too, but he was mid-blink so I cropped it, because it was too nice of the other boys not to! Here it is unchanged (in auto mode):



And in black and white:



Here's one of the boys just having fun (I took a good few like this, just snapping away - the whole "shoot" was very quick because they don't give me more than about 60 seconds before they seperate from each other (out of shot) or start hiding under the covers or messing about, etc!), taken in auto mode:



This one was of all three boys. I'm not posting the original but the older two were saying "cheese" (sigh!) and looked sooooo unnatural, while Nathey just looked edible and precious in the middle. If I look at the photo with the cheesy brothers on either side, it sort of dulls down the cuteness of Nathan in the middle, so I chose to crop them out, haha! ;) No, really, I just wanted to crop it to a cute photo of Nathan. It's not as crisp as I'd like, and it looks a little better if I fix the sharpness on the computer, but I'm not allowed to for this! Tsk! So, here it is as it came from the camera, in auto mode:



I love this one! I decided to make it more of a panoramic picture by cropping it that way. This is unchanged from the camera (except for the cropping) and was taken in auto mode:



I thought it might look nice in black and white, and here's the result (Neil loves it, and I am even wondering about framing it somewhere in the house, maybe?):



Here's the last one - another "fun" one, and it's a bit blurry where Nathan was moving his hand, and his face is partly hidden by the duvet, but I adore Matthew's soft happy expression! I decided to make it panoramic-ish again (and it was taken in auto mode):



Here it is in black and white, just to see:



I'm so pleased with them! I will be back with others soon!

Egg

Well, today I had a go at some of the things on my list for my "idea box" assignment. I took a lot of photos of the boys in the garden with the idea of using the hedge as "texture" or the light for harsh light and so on, but those really didn't turn out well. I DID get my definite "an egg" photograph though, so I wanted to post it right away! Once I uploaded my photos to the computer, I realised I wasn't sure whether I should be leaving assignment photos unedited or not. Eventually I decided that I would NOT edit them in any way except to crop them. So, I think some of the lighting and colour and white balance and so on will look bad, but I want to get an accurate picture of how my photographs are improving over time as I complete the assignments and learn more about using light and exposure and such. I won't be able to see that kind of progress if I touch up the photos I'm taking early on to make them look better. So I'm leaving them pretty raw! Except for cropping - I'm letting myself do that where necessary!

I took two photos of "an egg" that I liked, so here they both are: