Goal 1, has begun...

So, last night I started my photography course.  Number 1 on my list of personal goals. It’s only a very basic one, and will only run for a couple of months but I think for a beginners course that’s all you really need.  I don’t want to be inundated with too much info.  I’m sure to learn loads though…excitement! 

When I got home, one of my flatmates asked me how it went? The only thing I could say was, confused confused confused!! So many foreign words.  It’s a completely different language.  Aperture, ISO’s, shutter speeds, modes, focal lengths, 1-125^th, 1/125, 1:3.5 – 6.3, blah blah blah. 

 (photo taken from google)

Then she said something which I will take on board every single week......as long I learnt 3 things! and I think I already have!  

I now understand that if I program the camera to slow the shutter right down then I can take a photo of…..the moon, with the clouds around it!  I’ve tried so many times over the years to photograph the moon, all unsuccessful.  Such a shame as I’ve seen some beautiful moonlit cloud formations.  

as you can see, miserable fail!

I also learnt that if you make it go faster, it will, obviously, have the opposite effect. It will cut out all of the bright light so not to ‘over-expose’ the picture.  I can now tell you that ‘aperture’ is ‘the space through which light passes – the hole or opening where the light enters the camera’.  Make it bigger to try and capture as much light as possible (ie night shots) then you need to slow the shutter down. 

I also learnt what quite a few of the buttons do (which makes such a difference) and to stop deleting all of the shit photo's as they are the ones i'll learn from the most!  They'll tell me where I went wrong!

How will they? I hear you ask.  Well, the camera that I am using for my course is a Nikon D200…very flash and fancy.  But very bloody confusing!  It does however, have this great feature which is great for educating myself.  It will tell me all of the things I need to know about a photo as to why it made it good or bad…i.e. shutter speed, focal length, aperture!!!  I am sure all camera's will have this somewhere.

So, there's 13 of us in my class, plus the teacher. 4 male students and 8 female.  We’re all a good mix of age and demographic.  There’s a couple of youngins, I’d say 19-22 – 1 male, 1 female.  There’s an old Japanese man who seems delicate, shy and elegant. A middle aged Kiwi man of about 45? A young English man, maybe 28-32.  Then there are the ladies; we’re all a mix of about the same ages.

One of the first things I did when I got home was take a photo of the moon, and it sort of worked!!  Yay.  Practice will make perfect so I cant wait to see what a shot of the moon will look like in a week, a month, a year.

Here is a couple of my first ‘knowledgeable attempts of the moon!!

Goodnight scrumptious peeps!

Boots

xx