Picturing My World: Fathers' Day Gift

For a while now, I've wanted to take a class to get better at taking photos. Well this year Jill must have heard enough of me saying it and never doing anything about it, because she signed me up. Well technically she asked me if I would be interested first. But this is what I got for Fathers' Day this year. A 5 week class with a local pro 3 hours on Sunday afternoons. We are through three classes now and I thought I'd share some of the work I've done in class. The first couple weeks were mostly on how to not use the camera in auto mode and what accessories were better buys for starters than others. I'd experimented before in the manual, Av. and Tv. modes but only for specific situations, like using long shutter settings for fireworks and lightning shots or Apertures for portraits in low light. However, I never was really happy with the results. But a couple weeks in now and I feel much more comfortable running only in manual mode. A lot of what I've learned in the first couple weeks is that what I thought I knew, or understood reading websites and such I really didn't understand as well. I had convinced myself that to get the best pictures and get the desired effects I always had to be a the widest aperture, lowest ISO and fastest shutter speed for a given situation. Wow was I wrong, in class and in practice, I've found that I can still get great photo's, actually more consistent better photos not using my bad misconceptions. The other big thing was not to try and make every photo perfect, take a few more and expect some bad ones but I'll still probably get my shot. This week I nearly filled my 16Gb card with 500+ pictures during class of which only a few were really good, but if I had tried to get this many good ones doing specific single shots, I think it would have taken me much more time. So with that here are few shots of what we worked on...

Lighting.