bathtime

first foray into photoshop. i'm taking a betterphoto.com online course - my first formal photography course ever! - called "photographing children and babies." this is the second assignment: shooting the child as a "botanical" - isolating those parts of kids that we love to stare at.

it's becoming quite frustrating to take pictures of boo these days - he mostly declares "NO PICTURES mommy! put that camera away!" so in a sense this assignment was easier than the last one (which required getting a relaxed shot of evan looking directly into the camera. ha! not happening!)

i'm loving this course so far. you can look at all the photos that the other students take and the instructor's comments on those shots too. there's also a q&a forum that is helpful. i thought i could learn this stuff from a book, but i think that now i'm at the point in my photography (or my life) that i need the extra push of this course.

thanks to this course, i've already ...
- perused my nikon d80 book a lot more to recall what each button does and what all the terms mean
- realized that although my 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 lens is beautiful for most needs, it doesn't have a large enough aperture for me to take good inside pictures with natural light. so i bought a 50mm f/1.8 that is great!
- learned some techniques for improving exposure without resorting to flash - increasing the ISO, and the new lens with the larger aperture capability
- become more facile with changing white balance and ISO on my camera (though definitely still working on this)
- become motivated to learn more photoshop. just bought a scott kelby book on amazon. now i know that the d80 book that i bought didn't motivate me to use my camera as well as this course has, but hopefully i can dodge the need for another course ... or maybe not.

this site was recommended by my neighbor, who works part time as a children's photographer. the course was a christmas present :)