There were a lot of important things that I learned throughout this Digital Nature Photography course. When I first began the course I hadn't really had much experience with photography, but I was curious and excited to begin shooting photographs. It took me personally a little while to learn the settings that the camera had, but I finally got the hang of most of them. I learned to usually always use the manual mode while taking pictures. Also I learned that the best ISO speed to use is usually 400 ISO, but sometimes I would go to ISO 800 to let more light into the lense if there was dark light on my subject.
Throughout the class we had to do several blogs for assignments. Most of the online blogs were about photographers in which we admired for their photographs or on a certain type of photography, such as reflection shots in water, or macrophotography. Our final project also helped show my overall performance improving over the semester. I was able to show that I learned how to properly use the settings on my camera, and most importantly have learned to apply the rules of photography while shooting my photographs.
I learned alot about the rules of photography in my class, and I know now how important they can be to your photograph. The seven rules in which we learned of were red is more attractive than yellow, jagged lines are more attractive than curved lines, light is more attractive than dark, large draws more attention than small, difference draws more attention than conformity, diaganol lines are more attractive than vertical lines, and sharpness is more attractive than blur. We had small projects in which we had to capture these rules within our pictures, but in my final project I tried to capture some of these rules in more detail.
In my final project I really tried to incorporate my aperture, shutter speed, and ISO speeds, including some of the rules we learned during class. I learned which aperture and shutter speeds would be the best settings to have for my camera. It seemed as though for most of my pictures the shutter speed was around 1/800 to 1/1000 seconds, my aperture usually around F5, and my ISO was either set on 200, 400, or 800. I learned to periodically change my ISO settings according to the amount of light that was being transferred through the lense. The rule that I basically worked on throughout my photographs for my final project was the diagonal lines are more attractive than vertical lines, and the rule that jagged lines are more attractive than curvecd lines. I used many tree photographs within my photograph,so I had plenty of jagged lines with the oddly shaped branches.
I believe that one very important aspect of the class that I actually didn't realize was that important was using the photoshop program on the computer. The program we used was Adobe Photoshop CS5. I really don't like photoshopped pictures very much, I believe they look sort of unnatural. Yet, during the class I learned several ways of how to use some of the tools in photoshop to make subtle changes to my pictures without totally destroying the origianality of the photograph. I learned how important a levels adjusment or a brightness and contrast layer was to your photograph. Other useful tools that came in handy for my success with photoshopping my photos was the filter layer, hue and saturation layer, and the cropping tool, along with several other tools.
