In a world of so many great photographers and writers, I am venturing into some unknown territories, leaving comfort zones, finally very willing to practice the art of seeing. By maintaining the practice of posting daily photos, I hope to continue learning about the possibilities that I trust are out there for the taking.
In case you are wondering, this is torn wax paper being lit by a flashlight.
I'm embarrassed to tell how long I worked on getting this shot.
Carol Leigh offers this class: http://carolleigh.blogspot.com/2011/05/macroclose-up-class-begins-june-1.html
Today, I attended a class with a learn-your-camera photography teacher, Kevin Toohey, who one year ago had told me to shoot in manual. In the small class, I was one of 6 other students. Attending Kevin’s class brought home how knowledgeable and comfortable I’ve become with my camera and lens in the last year. It was a good feeling.
Major baseball tournaments were going on at the park where 7 of us met for the photography class. The kids were so cute.
And she caught the ball, but with her eyes closed.
Took this photo while we were in class when Kevin was going over something I already knew.
Kids were everywhere.
Kevin took this photo of me. I asked him to as I was shooting all my classmates and wanted a photo of myself on this day.
I shot a lot of photos of my classmates but am waiting for their approval to post them.
As I mention every chance I get, Carol Leigh is my online photography teacher and mentor. Today I got to talk to her and feel so much better about my day.
Two pearls of wisdom from Carol:
1. What is important is becoming, not being.
2. Look for the effect, not the technique.
I got lucky yesterday. Carol left an instructional comment regarding a photo I posted yesterday. Here is what she said: Linda, regarding your “Tranquil Morning” photo, what if you were to crop in from the left until just before you reach the first tree? But there’s more: What if you were to crop DOWN from the top so that we don’t see the top “horizon line?” NOW your photo is all about a small strip of truncated trees up top and their elongated reflections below. Forget the bird — he looks a tad overexposed anyway. Do I sound harsh? You know I don’t mean to. To me, the artistry in your photo lies in the trees and their reflections, nothing more is necessary. — Carol “feeling overly simplistic this morning” Leigh
Hopefully, I cropped this photo below per her suggestions. I like the photo so much better. Thank you Carol. And, thank you for making time to talk.
Cropped version per Carol Leigh's suggestion.
This week’s Photomotivation assignment is Corners, paying attention to light and color.
Here are 3 photos I took today and posted in Carol’s Photomotivation online class Yahoo group.
Assignment: Corners 1
Assignment: Corners 2
Assignment: Corners 3
This week our Photomotivation assignment is Art for Art. We are asked to find a mural, someone else’s photo, a photo from our archives, etc., and look for and select out a special area to create our own art from a previously rendered work. Our teacher, Carol, emails out a 3 page pdf explaining what she wants us to do.
Hopefully these examples explain a lot better than I did, what I mean. Can you see where, in the original photo, I took my crop from?
Original photo of door.
Cropped photo of door.
Original llama photo.
Cropped llama.
Original sign.
Cropped sign. (Wish I'd seen this for the Faces in Unlikely places assignment.)
This week’s Photomotivation assignment is Faces in Unlikely Places. I was having trouble seeing any faces. Mary Kay came over yesterday. I’d previously asked her to look out for Faces. Before MK left yesterday, she said that she’d seen eyes and a nose on the Museum a mile and a half away on Gerald Ford.
I decided to kill two birds with one stone and went for a different neighborhood exercise walk, outside our MHCC complex, on Gerald Ford. There it was, eyes and a nose as clear as day. I can’t believe I pass this Museum every day, many times a day, and never notice the eyes and nose in the photo I took below. Mary Kay, you get the credit, but I still posted the photo assignment in my class online group.
Children's Art Museum, Rancho Mirage, CA
On the way home from the walk, just inside our Mission Hills CC gate, I stopped to photograph some ducks. I looked up before leaving this spot and noticed this great reflection in the Arnold Palmer 4th hole lake. The time was about 3pm. I want to remember to go back there around this time again as I haven’t seen better reflection possibilities in some of the other golf course lakes. The angle I was shooting was 90 degrees south to the west sun.
Arnold Palmer 4th hole lake and green.
Our photo teacher, Carol Leigh, puts together a gallery of our work following each class. Here is an email she just sent out:
I created an online gallery of your work at my website and it’s up and ready for you to see. Here’s the link (to view class
#7, with lessons in straight lines, spirals, garage art, fish, motion, and symmetry): http://www.photoexplorations.com/Gallery072009/HTML/index.htm
What I did was select three images from each of you, trying to pick what I thought were your best. (That explains the feeble showing in the “Garage Art” section!)
Thank you for making this yet another successful online class.
Carol Leigh
We did good, didn’t we?
CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers
SYMMETRY
DIFFICULT RED
Not sure why you named this
“difficult,” Linda. If it was difficult,
you certainly did a good job with it.
Let me tell you everything you did
right . . .
Your primary challenge was depth of
field. I’m not sure how “deep” this
flower goes. It looks like a melaleuca
blossom, and sometimes they’re long
like a bottlebrush or they’re more
rounded but shallower. So your
decision was, how much do you want
in focus? Do you want just the tops of
the buds as they’re opening in focus?
Do you want buds and red flower?
Do you want buds, red flower AND
background in focus?
Photography was much easier when we didn’t know so much. When
I first began, I would have thought, “Oh, pretty flower. Click.” But
no more. Now I (we) agonize over lighting, depth of field, angle of
view — it’s not so simple any more. So in your case, when you were
working this flower (and now that I’ve seen you photograph in
person, both in Santa Fe and in Half Moon Bay), I kind of know
your thought process. So I’m guessing that yeah, you had a
challenging session with this flower.
You selected a lens aperture (f/stop) that would put the buds in
focus as well as the top “tier” of the red flower behind them. Focus
begins falling away as we move down through the flower and to the
leaves. By the time we see the very background, everything’s soft.
What you’ve done is you’ve presented a flower that’s extremely
sharp, where we can see how the new “tendrils”
emerge from the buds; we see the details in the
red tendrils and then all goes soft in the
background, but not so soft that we can’t see a bit
of the leaves. The background is soft enough,
however, not to be distracting, and so it sets off
your flower most dramatically.
What I also like is the terrific complementary
color combination of red and green. Extra drama
as a result.
Your lighting is very soft, very subdued. And as
a result the red really pops, really seems to glow.
We’re also able to see a lot of detail; nothing is
lost or obscured in dark shadows. If you’d had bright, harsh sunlight on this blossom, the look
would have been completely different.
Terrific focus. Very good lighting. Wonderful use of depth of field. Great colors. Beautifully
done.
I’m wondering, however, about the background on the left side. You’ve got lots of leaves on the
right, leaves that are pretty much the same color green as the green buds on top. But then on the
left side, almost splitting the photo in half, we’re seeing purplish non-leafy stuff. If your photo
is all about red/green/texture/symmetry, then “purple lines” doesn’t fit in with your concept and
becomes a distraction. Had you been able to put those same leaves in the left background, I
think your picture would have even more drama than it already has.
So for this “difficult red,” you handled the situation beautifully. You have no idea how
impressed I am with how you’ve jumped into photography with all four feet, and how much
you’ve learned about shooting,
your camera, and (I’m assuming)
Photoshop in just 12 months.
Major kudos to you, madam.
SIERRA LAKE
Holy crap! What a terrific shot! If
this is Convict Lake in the eastern
Sierra, I’m thinking it’s one of the
better photos I’ve seen of fall
color there. If it’s not, then what
do I know? 
It’s still a good
photo.
It’s often tough in scenes such as
this to expose properly for
everything. Most of the scene is
relatively dark — the
background valley coming down,
the trees, the reflection, etc. And
then there are much lighter areas
such as the hillside slanting
down from the upper right
corner, the patch of whiteness on
the hillside on the left (which is
reflected in the water), and little
bits of light grey granite rock
sticking out here and there.
When we have mostly dark
surroundings such as this, we
naturally meter for them, and as
a result, anything that’s much brighter can easily be overexposed and blown out. And since
those lighter areas are what our eye is drawn to first, they become major distractions. Not good.
In the case of your photograph, you handled the lighter areas well. They’re not so bright that
they’re annoying. The only spot I DO find distracting is the white patch on the left hillside and
its reflection in the water. I think that if this were my photo, I’d clone out both the white spot
and the white reflection.
My only other suggestion would be to straighten the photo a little bit since it looks as though it’s
leaning toward the left. This might be an optical illusion, however. When I line up your horizon
line with a straight line on my monitor, your horizon line seems to be straight. But if it LOOKS
wonky in the picture, even though it’s straight, I’d still rotate the picture a hair to the right to
visually dewonkify it.
Two excellent photos from you. You should be very pleased. Thank you for posting them.
Carol Leigh
January 26, 2009
(I wrote the following back to Carol Leigh.)
Carol,
Thanks for your critique. You know me well. Your critique was so right on I wondered if you were hiding behind a bush watching me attempt this shot. I did have a challenging session with “Difficult Red”. I spent a very frustrating hour and a half on this one photo, racing the setting sun and hoping to get the shot I wanted before I had to leave for an evening engagement.
All camera tries were on a tripod, except the last try with my little fanny pack camera. The sun was just about to set behind Mt. San Jacinto. The sideways light on the flower was perfect. The background sucked. I moved this way and that way for a better background flower angle. When I first used the 100mm macro lens, the background was blurred and not a distraction. The background looked ok. But….the flower had too much depth for the macro lens; I couldn’t, as you mentioned, get all parts of the flower in focus enough as there were too many varying planes. The flower was about 2/3 inch deep.
I noticed I wasn’t getting what I wanted because I kept shooting some shots and then taking my card inside to view the shots on the computer. After the macro lens, I changed to a 50mm lens. Too much in focus – ugly background. I even tried a 70-300 lens and of course I had to back away too far from “Difficult Red” and that lens didn’t work. Then I thought, try my little Sony A640 fanny pack camera. This little camera is the camera I used for this shot. It gave me more depth of field, more of the flower in focus from front to back. Remember I have that rotating LCD on this little camera that I hold out away from me as I focus close up to my subjects when I shoot. So when I got back to the computer I noticed I was holding the camera out and shooting slightly down on “Difficult Red”; I wasn’t on the same shooting plane as the flower. This shooting slightly down on the subject angle changed the distance from the top of the flower to the bottom enough that the bottom of the flower was slightly out of focus.
Once I realized I had another stumbling block to getting everything in good focus, I was mad, the sun was gone and I was late for my evening plans. I sat at my computer with my head in my hands feeling very defeated, UNTIL………..this thought came to me…….Look at all you learned trying to capture this shot Linda. It even dawned on you while your head was in your hands that you weren’t shooting on the same plane as the flower. And then this thought came…..My god, you learned more about what different lens do, you learned more about depth of field, you learned more about level/angle of shooting, you learned to pay more attention to ugly backgrounds so you don’t have to spend so much time trying to make an ugly background not so ugly and you learned more about your camera and your tripod. So…..Linda be happy because whether I you got the shot you wanted or not, you got the point……You LEARNED.
I thank you Carol for these classes that make me pick up the camera when I don’t think I have time, and do what I love, learn to see through the lens of the camera. By Jove, I think I may be learning a little something.
Regarding the Sierra Lake, I had this photo labeled Convict Lake in my photo folder, but I think it was a lake north of June Lakes, named Parker Lake off 395. I noticed the white fleck in the water and started to clone it out when I realized it was a reflection of the remaining snow on the mountain. I decided to leave the snow in. But I did see it! I agree the photo would look better without it. And, I too thought the photo of the Sierra Lake looked like it was listing.
Thank you for your critique.
A happy,
Linda
I was out shooting around 4:17pm today and Mt. San Jacinto blocked much of the only light left. I didn’t particularly like this series of wind turbine shots so I played with black and white. (My son put that thought in my head. Thanks Lane.)
I was playing with filters here.
I don’t think I mentioned that I am now using http://gottago.smugmug.com/ instead of the Flickr.com photo site.
I post the photos I take on the hikes I lead for the Mission Hills CC hikers. Check it out. Today’s hike was beautiful. We took a snack break at the Whitewater River.
I’ve been hounded by LR to start posting photos again. He says that photos shot off the TV don’t count as practicing photography. So here are two shots I took today. I’m considering turning in one for the Straight Lines #2 Lesson due Feb 9th.
Our photography teacher, Carol Leigh, posted the 5 best of all of the photos she and all of us students shot.
http://www.photoexplorations.com/Gallery2008/HTML/index.htm