Photography class assignments

My creative energies right now are pretty bound up in the digital photography class I'm taking. So I thought I'd share some of the assignments, and the images I came up with for them.

This is the 'Up against the edge' assignment. We were supposed to use the edges of the photograph in a deliberate way, drawing attention away from the center of the image. This helps counter the tendency to put everything smack dab in the middle of the shot. These were taken on back roads around Flagstaff, Arizona.

This set was about 'selective focus'. In other words, one part of the shot is in sharp focus, and the rest is blurred out.

And then the counterpoint to that assignment, a couple with extended depth of field where everything is in sharp focus. I played with the f-stop setting to accomplish this pair of assignments. This set was taken at the airplane graveyard down in Tucson, AZ.

A couple for a 'freeze motion' subject. That is my daughter practicing her veil work in the back yard. I needed a fast shutter speed for this.

Not surprisingly, this was paired with a 'blur motion' assignment. That is a D20 D&D dice spinning around there. In this case, a slower shutter speed caught the blur of the movement.

And this latest one was to shoot self portraits. I had to be in the shot, and I had to take the shot. I learned how to set the timer on my camera for this set. The first two are of my historical recreation alter ego, Mistress Gwen.

Then we've got my imp of a shadow, off playing in the woods.

And finally, a shot of me behind a drawing of me. This took some fiddling to get it to line up correctly. I did the drawing several years ago, from a photo set that was taken of me several years before that. So this is a self portrait on several layers. And, being a life drawing model, I find some symbolism in a shot of the woman behind the artwork.

I've got 3 more weeks in the class. This weekend's assignment is to shoot panoramas, which we'll stitch together in Photoshop. That will be another new thing for me to learn. I really feel like I've stretched already in this class. It will be fascinating to see what the next few weeks bring!