My Portfolio

Today I finished up my 2-day photography class held by Rocky Mountain School of Photography. My friend Nickie got the same camera that I did for Christmas, so she decided to take the class with me. At the end they talked about your "porfolios" and since I don't have one and probably never will, I decided that will be my blog. Here it is in a nutshell:

Registration and Orientation: To begin at 8am and classes at 9am. Nickie and I decide that 8:15 sounds like a good time to get there since there probably won't be that many people there. In my true fashion, I show up at 8:30 and have to STAND in the back of the room because the other 250 seats are taken! I knew it was going to be a good time with Nickie there when she pulled out her camera and took a picture of everyone in that room for her blog! I was too embarrassed to do it, but she did the dirty work.
Course #1, Basics of Photography: This was the first class we sat in. I failed the very first thing he taught us, which should have probably been the easiest... how to hold your camera. Maybe this should have been my first clue! Anyways, we learned about aperture, shutter speeds, F-stops and ISO, all of which were completely foreign to me when I walked in that door. Nickie and I were feeling pretty good about ourselves after that class.
Course #2, Beyond the Basics: In this class we learned more about aperture, shutter speed and ISO and threw in some jargon about metering and some other stuff. A little bit over my head, but there were parts I thought I really understood. After this class we had a lunch break and Nickie and I thought this was great and even though it was a little over our heads, we could handle it.
Course #3, Understanding Light: Here we learned about when and when not to use flash and about white balance. I kind of tuned out the whole white balance thing because it was way over my head and I have so many baby steps that I need to take before I can even think about white balance. Nickie and I left this one a little overwhelmed.
That Night At Home: I decide that I'm going to get my notes out and "practice" all these cool things I learned. Having been told by the instructors that they never want us to use Auto mode again, I was determined to put my Manual skills to work. Long story short, most of my pictures turned out black or extremely fuzzy. I was depressed.

Course #4, Photographing People: This pretty much used all of what we learned the previous day and wasn't too bad, but in the back of my head I was still picturing all the black pictures I had taken the night before, and become less and less confident that I would ever be able to do any of this.
Course #5, Photographic Techniques with Photoshop: Nickie and I had learned early on that we needed to be in the front of the class, so this time we scored front row seats. When the class started he started talking about panoramas and we were both bored and confused. We thought this was a Photoshop class. Nickie whispered in my ear that if we weren't in the front row we could sneak out and switch classes. I'm glad we didn't though because we finally got into some really cool things we can do in Photoshop.
Critique: This by far was the best (and funniest) part of the weekend. Each person got to submit a photo to be displayed on the projector in front of everyone else to be critiqued by the instructors. All I can say is thank goodness it was anonymous. Nickie and I just busted up laughing when the 1st picture came on the screen. It was really creative and very professional. And so was the next one, and the next one, and ALL of them.... except my and Nickie's "snapshots" of our kids. It was so hard not to laugh outloud the entire time just waiting for our pictures to come up. They were very "nice" in the way they critiqued, although they said Nickie "broke all the rules, but it seemed to work" and for mine "Bodey's face washed out and the sky was blown out." Not too bad for complete rookies I guess!
Overall, this was a very good learning experience for me and I'm really glad that I took the time to do it. I have SOOOOO much to learn and a ton of playing around to do, but hopefully by the time they come back to KC in two years, I'll be able to take it again and build on it.