Photography Workshop - Portrats

Well week 3 of our workshop came and went.  I've decided I'm not much of a studio guy and not a people person at all.  Needless to say I was less than enthused about my results this week.  We worked on portrats using a white background an impromptu "volunteer" (the daughter of one of our classmates).  The little girl (who's name I never did catch) was cute, though kind not very generous with the smiles, but it wouldn't have mattered if Shirly Temple was sitting there.  I couldn't get the focus right, my lighting was bad meaning I couldn't get the flash to do what I wanted.  Our book said to use a tripod, a focal length of 85-100, and an F-stop of F/11.  I tried all of that and more and it was just not working for me.  Not a great first experence with my new equipment, though I did get to play with some of the features including my remote which was cool.  Here are the best that I got but I don't think they look much better than your standard mom-with-a-point-and-shoot picture.

Photography Workshop - Flowers on Black Background

Well there's a compelling title! Anyway, yes, I am attending a photography workshop at my church every other Sunday. It's pretty basic (which is what I need) but it gives me a chance to learn and try new things. This week it was flowers. We had a short discussion on how-to's for shooting flowers using Scott Kelby's book, The Digital Photography Book #1, as source material. Then on to the application!

We shot using a black back drop held up on a rigging and draped over a table about three feet out. Light was supplied by 2 umbrella lamps (I have no idea what the technical term for them is but I'm going with umbrella lamps. The kind you see in Sears for kids photos). We moved the vases and flowers and turned off lamps as necessary. Here's what I got:

"Posed" shots aren't my favorite, I prefer naturally occurring. That being said, this is really my first attempt at posed flowers and it wasn't so bad. It took me a few moments to find my comfort zone but once I knew what I was looking for, I went with it. I still don't like the fact that I can't get my camera to "stretch" the photo like I want (another term I just came up with, stretch 1. to make the foreground and background look further apart by blurring one or the other. Sounds good eh?). I keep seeing too much detail in the background covering. I need to upgrade my camera to get what I want. Hopefully more on that in a later post!

One of the tips in the book was to take flower photos right after the rain. We so happened to have some of that earlier and I took advantage:

I'm sure I looked amusing to any passersby as I was laying on the wet ground, getting covered with mud and sticking my camera right up to flowers (again, would be solved by an upgrade). Ah, the sacrifices I make for my craft! I think they came out pretty well though.