Photography 101

Over the last few weeks I have been taking a basic photography class at the local technical college.

In case you are new to the blog, or just simply very unobservant, I LOVE taking pictures. I'll take pictures of people, buildings, things, nature, sunsets, anything. If there's a party - chances are I'll be there with the camera. If there's an event, I'll probably be the one behind the flash, unless of course I leave the battery at home in the charger!

This photography class has been fascinating in that it's covered everything from how film works to how to compose a picture. We learned about aperture, light meters, shutter speed, film speed, and more than I can even remember right now.

We had to turn in some pictures for our final project (the one and only project that we weren't even graded on - the beauties of Continuing Education). So, Danny and I set out last Saturday afternoon for a photo shoot in downtown Columbia.

Now, I am use to using a basic, point-and-shoot ditigal. That means that I can't adjust anything, I just point, click and take as many pictures as I want. Now, for this class I was using an electric Canon 35mm, to which I do not have the manual. So, I really couldn't adjust anything on this camera either. (The manual has been ordered and is suppose to be in the mail, so hopefully this class will not go without some good practice photography).

However, I had forgotten how permanent film photography is. You only get 24 shoots per roll, and you can't see what they looked like before you develop them. And then you must drop you film off and pay $10 before you can even glimpse at the images on the cd you get back from Ritz camera.

So, there I was in downtown Columbia, pointing my camera at everything and not shooting much at all. It was sheer agony. I was carefully analyzing everything through my viewfinder for five minutes before decided whether I should snap that shutter or not.

Horizontal or vertical?

Where's my focal point?

What's in focus? Foreground or background?

Was that shoot worth using up 1/24 of my film?

Oh, the terror of not seeing your pictures or not knowing if your whole roll of film was going to come back horrible.

After an hour of stressful waiting my pictures were finally done at Ritz and some were good and some were bad. Here they are.