12 Weeks to Better Photos Week 2

This week's lesson was on ISO and Shutter Speed. ISO is the film speed. "ISO, or film speed, is really just a setting to determine how quickly an image will be captured by either the film or digital sensor. The higher the ISO, the quicker the image will be captured and the less light that is required. The lower the ISO, the longer it takes for the image to be captured and the more light you will need. " "Your shutter speed is how quickly the shutter, or the little door that opens in front of your film or image sensor, operates. It can range from several seconds (or minutes on the Bulb setting) to 1/1600 of a second or faster. It might help to visualize your shutter literally as a door, with your shutter speed controlling how fast or how slow the door opens and closes" http://www.twopeasinabucket.com/class_pdfs/photocourse/weektwo.pdf

For the photographs this week, we were to take two pictures. One with a low shutter speed, such as 1/80 and one with a high shutter speed. Since I was inside with bad lighting, I set my ISO to 1600. The assignment was to take a picture of water flowing from a faucet over an object that would interrupt the flow. I was really excited about this project after seeing sample pictures. Unfortunately, I wasn't very happy with the end results of my pictures since, as I mentioned, I was dealing with bad lighting. The window over our kitchen sink is really small and the sun never really gave great light. I ended up going upstairs to our master bath. The problem there was the faucet is really close to the side of the tub, and thus didn't give a good flow of water over my cup. I ended up letting the water fill the cup and spill over. So, without further adieu (or excuses) here are my pictures...

 1/80

1/80

1/80

1/1000

For the high shutter speed photo (1/1000), I used picmonkey to lighten the picture because it came out too dark. 

Becoming a Momtographer!

Way back in the summer of 2011 after finding out I was pregnant with the dragon, I quickly jumped online to join The Bump and found a community in March Moms 2012. Not long after many of our little ones were born, some of us moved to a facebook group because it's a little easier to communicate there than on than the bump. Anywho...long story short, one of the moms has put together a 12 week online photography course. Santa was very good to me this year and brought a Nikon D3000. I've been wanting a fancy DSLR for FOREVER.  Now that I have one, I need to know what to do with it. I am going to try my hardest to blog each week's lesson, on time :)

Week One: Aperture. Basically, aperture size determines how much of the picture is in focus. The aperture number is the f/stop. I'll just link the lesson website rather than regurgitate it all here, but the gist of the lesson was this "Basically, when you use a low f/stop, less of your photo will be in focus. When
you use a higher f/stop, MORE of your photo will be in focus."
http://www.twopeasinabucket.com/class_pdfs/photocourse/weekone.pdf

Without further ado...here are my first attempts at using my camera as more than a point and shoot. The assignment was to take three pictures at different apertures of a fixed subject.

This was taken with f/3.5 (the lowest setting my lens will go)

This was taken with f/8

 This was taken with f/22

We also were to take a challenge photo, so I used my favorite subject...my little dragon!

I took this with f/8 because I liked the amount of blur in the background the best at this aperture. Please ignore the wet spot  on the couch. The dragon likes to bite it as he stands there. Honestly, I took a ton of pictures trying to get the challenge one just right. I'm not super happy with the results, but my "subject" doesn't really stay in one place for long anymore...

Here is the blog from the mom running the course. It's great...give it a look! http://christenheartspinterest.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/12-weeks-to-better-photos-course-week-one-aperture/