Reflection
This was an interesting week. Most previous weeks, I felt like I understood the lessons and would have an easy time going out there and taking photos that demonstrated new skills, and I was usually wrong to be confident. This week, maybe because I took so many long exposure photos, it felt like there was less of an instantaneous, concrete feeling of either success or failure. There was a lot more trial and error, a lot more experimentation, a lot more learning along the journey. In fact, this week I took as many photos as I previously had in the rest of the weeks combined (granted, some of those will be for next week's assignment).
The cover photo, and second photo in the body here, is one of my favorites of the class so far. I find it eerie. It's both light and dark (very long exposure with high ISO in very dark conditions), the subject is half dead half alive (annual flowers that had bloomed and died a few seasons ago, amongst other healthy foliage), the perspective is a little odd in that the viewer is placed slightly below foreground foliage but can still see under the trees. That photo was a success, albeit an unexpected one. I took about 5 of those and expected them to all be bad. I just wanted to try out a picture from a distant and dim light source, and I got lucky.
One thing that was hard was taking pictures of stars! As it turns out, they are effectively not stationary, nor are they easy to focus on. Focus wound up actually being the main challenge there, and I never figured out an easier method for most of my star pictures than taking a whole bunch of photos through focus and hoping to get one good one.
Another lesson walking away here is the importance of remote or delayed shutter captures. Every time I took a time delay picture with my camera (usually just 2 seconds for me to remove my hand and allow the tripod to stabilize), it would default back to an instant capture! Very annoying, still need to figure that out. I also learned that to use bulb mode, you need to be able to hold a shutter button for a long time (30+ seconds), which for me, would produce a totally streaky blurry bad picture without a cable, so I may get one of those.