First Meeting.

This was the week of Halloween. I love the textures of the pumpkin....and the gooey stuff inside it. :)

Today was a very long meeting. It was my first 3 straight hours and boy did I learn a lot! First, we looked at all the pictures I had taken last week. In my pictures, I needed to think about what is in the background. What is in the background can disturb what you are trying to focus on. I also needed to work on my lighting again. This time he told me about white balance and how it makes the picture look normal. All light has a temperature and that makes a color. So in a gym the lighting will be greenish-blue and sometimes orange. Regular light bulbs make pictures look orange and warm. To make the lighting look normal you need to go to the WB button and select the proper environment you are in. The best thing he showed me about his was that you can custom white balance your picture, which makes the picture look 10 times better! After about 30ish minutes of talking about my pictures, a family of 3 came to take pictures of their little boy, Jacob (he wasn't quite 1 years old yet). I got to see how the whole shooting process worked. It made me realy excited to think that I can do that someday. He had to fix the lighting, get the proper camera gear, etc. for the baby. During the photoshoot the baby started crying all the time. I tried to help it stop crying by shaking one of his toys above Dan's head, but that only worked half the time. I'm not sure if I could take good pictures of a baby that won't smile or look at the camera. Baby pictures are hard to shoot, but it isn't impossible it just takes a lot of extra time. After we finally finished the baby photoshoot, it was back to more teaching. We talked a little bit about depth of field. For example at f-stop 3.5 it has a bigger opening but less depth of field. At f-stop 11 it has a smaller opening but more depth of field. When looking at my pictures he noticed I didn't have it set to RAW (so when it is on the computer there is more information about the picture), so we changed that. With RAW there is more information (as thick as a phonebook) with JPG it is as thick as a magazine. So every time you save a JPG it compresses the picture down, so there is not as much information in it each time it is saved and it becomes very pixely. Then it was time for the mind boggling to start. ISO, SP, and F-stop and how they all work together. They all control the light that comes into a picture. He explained it all to me, but I am still confused about it all. He gave me three practice conversion thingys to try. I have to change two of the three things, but when I take the picture I want the picture to look exactly the same as the original settings. I just hope I can understand this stuff and keep my head intact in the end.