Jennifer is a local photographer who teaches these photo safaris every week to help budding/aspiring photographers. She begins with a lesson on how to use your camera and offers tips on posing, lighting, etc. After the lesson we all walked around downtown to take pictures and practice using the techniques she had just taught us. She gave us assignments with things to try and capture and then answered any questions we might have had.
Now I don't really consider myself very good at still life photography (pictures of things). I'd much rather capture people or events. But it was still good practice and I was pretty happy with some of the pictures I came away with and super excited about the things I learned and want to put into more practice.
So far as a photographer I have been having to rely a lot on Photoshop to fix what I can't control in my picture-taking. I know this is a really bad thing to do, so I was really relieved that Jennifer helped me learn to control the actual picture instead of relying on Photoshop to fix it. All of these images are SOOC (straight out of camera), except that I sharpened them and downsized them for optimal viewing on this post:
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| My safari buddy, Mallory! |
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| Getting a new angle: ordinary objects become much more interesting when you take a different perspective |
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| Capturing texture: Leaves in the grass. I was almost laying on the ground to get this shot. |
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| Capturing highlights on a water fountain |
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| Working with white balance: detail of the fountain statue |
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| Not getting the white balance quite right, but I still like this shot. |
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| Playing with depth of field: Flowers |
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| Capturing texture and pattern |
So are these the world's greatest shots? Certainly not. But I did think some of them turned out kind of cool. And I'm looking forward to getting more practice!
P.S. See Mallory's pictures from the day here.
