Photography Class: {Week 3 & 4}

The last week slipped away from me (crazy stuff keeping me busy, like our condo being robbed! And celebrating a friends wedding!), so here's the last two weeks worth of photography class. Less words this time, too, because I have too much to get done today...

Week 3: Focus

These pictures were all about different planes of focus. some close up pictures with a blurred background, and others with a deep depth of field. I love using a large aperture and intentionally blurring the background of my shots, so I tried to push myself to take more deep focused landscape pictures. I went to Montrose Beach to take a lot of these, which was a fun change of setting!

Not bad, but I should have focused a bit further back for a sharper picture.

I love this one!

Portraits were part of the assignment, and Joe
was a good sport, like always :)

Using my hobby to document his hobby.

It was a really sunny day at the beach, which made it hard to do crisp and
properly exposed landscapes. Not terrible, but not great.

Jumping ahead to next week, I tried to capture some movement from the
Lake Michigan mini-waves. Wishing that was actually the ocean...

And on to week 4-- movement. 

This is a fun topic to play around with, with freezing motions and also doing intentional blurring. I mostly tried to use a fast shutter speed to capture movement stopped in time, but did play around with some blurred elements as well. This was the week our condo got broken into (thankfully, they missed my camera!), so I crammed all the pictures into the weekend, and was a bit more distracted than usual. I'm going to make sure to play around with this idea more in the future. 

Modern dance has great movement.
Indoor performance lighting is tough for
good pictures, though!

Let's salsa!

The bride-to-be (in red) and her future husband (to her left) are adorable!

We went to Millennium Park for some other great motion shots.
Lots of water around there, with the pretty fountains.
I learned from this picture that drops of moving water show up much clearer
against a dark background, like the edge of the fountain. 

This picture has no movement, but I thought it
was too pretty not to share!

Walking, biking, running.
Lots of movement, but not the most beautiful composition.
Gotta work on that!

Joe's hidden talent... juggling!
Again, he's such a good sport. Love this guy!

And now this week we're learning about lighting. I just took a morning walk to get a coffee, and took my camera along for the journey. I got some interesting shots in both direct and diffused lighting, which will be great to share in class. I'm so happy to be using my camera a lot more with this class! This is the fifth week, so we're only halfway through. Next week we start editing, too, which is what I'm most eager to learn! Get ready, mom, the family Christmas picture will be edited before you know it :)