Second Meeting.

The sun is soooo b-e-a-utiful!!

If you look really close on the leaf you can see some frost. The days when everything started to frost I went outside to take cool pictures of the frost. Sadly, I could not take a macro pictures of the frost because I don't have a macro lens...but nonetheless, I took this great shot!!

The first thing we do when I arrive at the studio is review my pictures I had taken. Last week Dan asked me to take pictures with different white balances and see which one looked the best for the picture. He had given me the assignment to go into a gymnasium and see which white balance fits. I did that and while we were looking at the pictures the flash white balance looked the best. Although the flash didn't fire it still looked good. But, just to make sure that that white balance wasn't just a fluke, he asked me to go back to the gym and take another picture with flash WB. Some of my other pictures were kind of blurry because I had set my shutter speed too slow and my hand made the camera shake, causing the picture to be blurry. I tried taking pictures of the full moon on Monday, but they were blurry. He gave me some tips on how to reduce the blurriness of the picture: mount the camera on a tripod and use a self timer to avoid shaking the camera when you take the picture. I am definitely going to try that because I really want a cool picture of a full moon...but i will have to wait another 28 days for another full moon. After reviewing my pictures, a family of six came to the studio for family pictures. Seeing how to shoot family pictures was very good for me. I got to see how to place all the people and different poses. One thing I noticed was that a photographer must be able to problem solve in any photoshoot because not everything goes as planned. Last week we had the problem of 6 month old Jacob crying all the time, and this week Dan didn't have enough platforms for the family to stand on the make the proportions look good. So, instead of having really tall people standing on platforms and really short people standing on no platform, Dan quickly thought to get stools from his house and have two kids kneel on them. That seemed to work just fine because he only took the picture from the waist up. After the family left, Dan gave me some homework to do for next Tuesday. He wants me to post things on my blog, find other photography blogs that I like, watch a photography movie he gave me, and most importantly take different pictures (variety). I think I'll try to go up to Skyline, Highland, or even go out to Hatchers Pass before too much snow comes. Things are going well with my mentorship, although the whole ISO, Shutter speed, and F/stop thing all working together is still a little fuzzy, but one of these days I'll understand.