Photography Class

I just finished taking a beginning photography class at the local community college.  That had been on my to-do list for after the kids all went to school, and a few days before the class started, my friend told me she had signed up and encouraged me to do the same.  I quickly signed up. 

The class was perfect, it was designed to teach us how to use the manual settings on our digital SLR cameras.  It started with how to use f-stops, shutter speed and ISO.  I have tried before to figure those out, and gotten it for a few hours, but it was nice to have it written out for me, then to have specific assignments and then critique on the assignments.  We would spend some portion of the classes outside, taking pictures and checking our settings.  I still have a long way to go, but I feel like I really have learned a lot.  After the beginning, we then learned some about how to compose pictures to get a good photo.  I still have a lot to learn about that, but that is something you can get with time and practice.  At the end of the class, we went over editing, and used an online website to edit that worked pretty well.  Here are some of the pictures I was able to take from the class:

 

The theme for YW this year is Stand in Holy Places.  We wanted a good picture of the temple to print and hand out to the girls at Young Women in Excellence.  These were the ones I was able to come up with.

 We learned that if you use a tripod and slow your shutter speed, you can get pictures that have the water that looks blurry and pretty.  There aren't a lot of waterfalls here in the flat part of Texas, but I often see them when I travel, so it will be nice to be able to do that.

We also learned to do stop motion:

 I especially want to get better at taking pictures of my kids.  Since I have a good enough camera, why pay someone else to take pictures of them?  I took a bunch of Ellie for her baptism, and some of them are shown here, when we get a little closer to her baptism, I will post all of the good ones.

 This next one is just silly.

 Lastly, I made our family immortal for Halloween.  The photo editing website she showed us is picmonkey.com, and you can easily morph your family into vampires, zombies or witches on there.  It was pretty fun.  If you want to do more editing, it has a lot of options, and most of them are free.