Lot’s of stuff like this.

Eek! Toronto Island is slowing disappearing. We have been having c-r-a-z-y weather this week and this island-eating fog is the most recent example.

Have been avoiding my camera lately. Not sure why. Thankfully, some friends came up to visit and wanted to hit the zoo, so I had the perfect excuse to break it out. I love taking pictures of animals!

I have a major problem with exposure. Usually I end up underexposing. Luckily, my new iMac and a trial version of Aperture allowed me to fix some of that.

I’ve thrown a few of my favourites up on flickr.

I’ve been stressing about this the whole time I’ve been taking this course. Our final assignment was to tell a story using the various techniques we’ve learned over the 6 weeks. Eek!

I originally wanted to stalk someone. But that seemed… creepy. Then I thought I’d convince one of my friends to let me pretend to stalk them. But that seemed like a lot of… work. I finally settled on… well, I’m not going to tell you. If I have to describe it, then I didn’t do my job. The pictures are up on Flickr. Many thanks to my fabulous model “Thomas”…

Just a few notes. I wanted to re-shoot over half of these pictures (but really needed to get this done) and several of them were the unexpected result of editorial input from my “model”.

Also, in a technical sense, these pictures aren’t that good. That’s not fishing for compliments. That’s being honest. There are a few shots that are a little blurry and I’ve been told that I need to focus on the eyes a bit more when I’m photographing people. However, I’ve learned a lot and I’m hoping that I can take the techniques from this course and apply them to my “fun” shots.

So, I guess, in the end, I set out what I wanted to do: Learn to take better photos. Now let’s see if I can actually put that into practice.

Oh, where to begin with the lameness that was assignment #4. Let me explain. The assignment wasn’t lame, my pictures were. Our class last week was all about lighting and our assignment was to take pictures at different times of day and to experiment with reflectors and flash. My photos were so lacking in imagination that I almost didn’t hand my assignment in. However, I just had to remind myself that I’m taking this class to learn the technical side of things, not to be artistic. You can see the complete mess on Flickr… well, almost complete. I didn’t upload my sad, sad efforts to demonstrate ambient light. I just couldn’t bring myself to say to the world “Hey, I took this… on purpose”.

This last part was just meant to test out the various focal lengths of lenses. I only used one of mine – the 55-200mm (I also have an 18-55mm). And don’t I make a great stalker?

There were several types of required shots for this part: framing, foreground/background, using lines to draw you into a picture, trying different angles of the same shot, using the rule of thirds, and capturing the same shot horizontally and vertically. Some I’m quite proud of (all of the ones of my little guy) and others I completely gave up on (see the pigeons).

The first part of assignment #3 was to take a picture of something “properly exposed” – according to the camera’s light meter – and then overexpose and underexpose to get a variety of exposures. The purpose was to highlight how different (and sometimes better) a picture can turn out by over/underexposing.

Before I start working on assignment #3, I thought I’d put up a few more of what I’ve started calling my “oldies”. That is, pictures from the past few years that I like but that I took without any sort of clue about how to take a good photograph. Something I noticed… I tend to cut off the tops of things! The picture above is not an example of this. But go to my Flickr account and you’ll see what I mean. I might need to create a whole new tag just for photos I cut off. Oh, and I desperately need a “Tilt Shift Lens” (oh look! Nellie learned something in class this week!).

Instructor was sick this week so new new photography skills to report. However, as you can tell, I have figured out all the fun things on Flickr.