photography notebook
i started my photography notebook today.
i guess i’ve made a lot of progress on the photography front lately. i signed up for the new york institute of photography course and working on my first assignment. in addition to my course work, i wanted to do some work with portraits, so i bought some new (some needed, some not) equipment, including a background stand and a new strobe. i took some pictures for some friends on saturday, which didn’t turn out as good as i hoped. if there is good news out of that, it’s that i know how it could have been improved, and i think that will help keep me motivated to continue to practice and learn. i also took some shots at the CCT production of Grease this weekend, i think i got some nice pictures from that. you can look at them here.
tonight i continued to practice, and set out to take some pictures of my guitar (tomorrow i get my new guitar, yay!) . the first shoot was sloppy on my part. i wanted to see how three variables (shutter speed, aperture, flash power) affected the lighting of the guitar. but the guitar was too close to the background, and i didn’t use a tripod so i introduced a few other variables that i did not intend.
instead of giving up, i went downstairs and tried again. the second shoot had the background further back, the light source (strobe with a shoot through umbrella) was a little higher up, and, very importantly, the camera was on a tripod. so this time, i could actually see the results limited to those three variables.
the results were mostly as expected. i was trying to do the math for those variables to see if i could get consistent (or at least expected) results by changing those variables, and i think i did for the most part. i documented it all in the photography notebook, since i think i’m one of those people that learns better by writing things down (plus i can go back and look at it). it’s also nice to have a plan (i wrote down all the shots i wanted to take before hand, in terms on the variables in question) to follow.
i also learned that picasa automatically “fixes” images by default. i imported them using picasa, which i usually do. i exported them to post to flickr, and noticed that all the pictures looked pretty similar when they shouldn’t have. so shrunk them in photoshop instead and uploaded those images. i’ll need to figure out how to tell picasa to leave my junk alone.
in any case, you can view the guitar shots from the second shoot here. i even included the setup shot for strobist folks. i also put the one i liked best on kettlepot here.
i think that’s it for tonight. i learned today that an old work acquaintance that i haven’t talk to in a bit is moving to texas. i wish her all the luck in finding what she’s looking for.
me, right now, i’m looking to go to bed.