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!