Understanding Light

I was able to watch an hour of great training on Creative LIVE on Thursday while my son was in an art class.  It was presented by Mark Wallace as part of a 3-day training.  He is such an excellent teacher.  I wish I could have tuned in and watched the whole thing.  I think I would have come away with so much valuable information.  He really explains the scientific side of things and I firmly believe that success in this is going to be understanding how and why things work or don't work.  I just got snippets of information- but it was helpful.  He also hinted about a Color Theory class that  I think would be invaluable.

I am still working little by little on editing Wendy's photos.  I know I need to be patient. But, I am so incredibly frustrated that I didn't nail those photos like I wanted.  The editing is leaving me more frustrated.  I think I might have figured out my problem ( at least part of it) and that is that the lens can have a front or back focusing issue that needs to be adjusted.  There are some diagnostic type test to do-- I need to find the time to do them.  Additionally, with some of this training- I was again reminded of the importance of the technical side of things.  There is a Depth of Field calculation that should be considered-- I was trying to get a shot of the girls walking down a row of trees.  I was thinking that I only needed to make sure the exposure was right with a fast enough shutter speed to freeze their movement, and high enough aperture to have them all in focus.  But the length of the lens matters as does the distance of the camera from the subject-- all those things need to be plugged into an equation that would tell me where my focal range would be.  8 ft - 15 ft from the camera would be what is in focus (for example.)  Also..when shooting at a distance, more pixels are spread out over more area.  So, their faces will not have such fine detail as when shooting close up.  In a close up you have more concentrated pixels so it makes sense, I suppose, that some of the shots look more grainy that I would like them.  I still have so much more to learn to figure out everything I did wrong..but there's a start.  Here's one that I have edited a little but am still just not satisfied with