….no action, but just wanted to share a few pics from my Advanced Digital Photography class that I just finished at the end of May. This class was all about lighting and was a lot of fun! I enjoyed setting up the studio lights and using them for still life and portrait photography.

Written permission was given by my model, Heather, to share these pics on my blog. I would love your feedback. For both of these photos, I used manual mode, my 50mm 1:1.4 lens and a Soft Box light set at half strength. I had so much fun working with Heather. She is a professional photographer so she knew exactly how to pose. I didn’t really ask her to do anything, she chose her poses. She also is a belly dancer and had lots of neat scarves, fans, netting, jewelry, etc. to work with. I took several photos of her but am only sharing what I think are my best two. I am shooting at 100% manual mode now and loving it.

These two were from one of our still life projects. I edited them in Photoshop using the solarization tool. I like how they both turned out. Even though they are of the same objects, the two styles of editing completly change the vibe of the photos.

I recently purchased a 430EX II Speedlight flash and it is making a world of difference for my indoor photos. I am also slowly learning editing and am looking forward to the arrival of Lightroom 5, which should be delivered to my house this week.

I took these this afternoon. This one is without any flash. The lighting in my home is very dim. This is SOOC (Straight out of camera). Yes, I could have used some editing software to try to fix the under exposure, but my goal is to do very little editing. I would like to understand completely how to set up various shots by adjusting shutter speed, ISO, aperture, flash exposure, white balance etc. so that my pic SOOC is a very good one. 🙂 Mitch says I am getting in too deep. He may have a valid point. I use to actually read books at night before bed. Now all I read is websites and facebook pages about photography. Until I no longer enjoy it, I will continue on.

She moved so this is not the exact pose, but this was taken seconds after the above shot with the flash bouncing off the ceiling at a 90 degree angle. The only editing I did was cropping Mitch’s leg out.

I hope everyone in blogger land is doing well and I look forward to catching up on your blogs and to your critiques of my photos!