Oh a whim this weekend I took a one day photography class.  While I've been practicing photography for years now and know some of the general techniques to use.  I've always been confused about how to know what manual settings to use in certain situations.  This class cleared a lot of those things up.

Somethings I learned:

- Aperture (the size of the hole opened to let light in) is measured in what are called f-stops.  I learned a little history behind this setting.  The first film was very hard to expose, and therefore the camera needed as much light as possible.  This meant the photographer left the  lens wide open.  As film advanced and photographers needed to limit the light getting to the film they started putting medal plates over the lens.  This hole started getting smaller and smaller and f-stops started getting larger and larger.

- Aperture is also what one uses to create the "shallow depth of field" look on images.  A shallow depth of field is best seen in pictures where part of the picture is crisp and the rest is blurry, like out of focus.  What is interesting about this is that for the longest time, shallow depth of field was really easy to capture.  What was difficult was having everything in focus.  Now with digital cameras it's the opposite.  If you look at lots of the pictures the little point and shoot cameras take, everything is in focus (larger depth of field) and it has become more difficult to capture a shallow depth of field photo.

- We looked a good collection of Ansel Adams pictures.  While almost everyone can see one of his photos and enjoy the beauty of it, I have learned to appreciate how far ahead of his time he was. We often take for granted how sharp and clear his photos were, when they were really hard to capture that way.  Like I mentioned above, in the olden days, it was hard to capture large depth of field photos (everything is in focus).  He went to extreme lengths to take beautiful depth of field photos all around California.

- I also learned about shutter speed.  I've learned through practice that there is really a limit to how slow you can have a shutter while holding it by hand.  I never really knew the limit but learned this week that 1/60th of a second is really about as slow as you want to take photo holding it by hand

- Something else I learned recently, though not at this class, is the rule of 32 in photography.  I'm not sure who'd blog I found it on, but they were pointing out that a photography teacher they had told them about this rule.  In the film days you could usually get 32 photos per roll of film.  Out of those 32 pictures you should be able to select 1 photo to keep.  In this age of digital cameras we are of the opinion that they are digital and cost nothing to keep taking, which leads us to have lots of mediocre pictures.  I am really bad about this.  I like to post lots of pictures and share a mediocre picture just because so-in-so is in it.  While I'll probably keep doing that for people shots, I'm working hard to stick to the rule of 1 in 32 rule for "artistic" pictures I take.  It's hard not to share everything, but I think it will be better in the long run.  Put my best photos out there, ya know?

I'm excited about what I learned this weekend and can't wait to go take some more photos.  For now, here are some random shots I took practicing this weekend.  Nothing terribly exciting, but it is close to that rule of 32.

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