Photography Classes

The free class on Summer Photography from Creative Live last week was good enough to draw me to another of their online classes this week on Photographing American’s National Parks. I discovered that I am more interested in composition than I am in technique or retouching. But there is a lot to learn about how to get the best shot you can in the moment and then using cropping to improve (or salvage) an image.

The recent picture of the Complaining Robin (last Thursday’s post) was taken just before the course and I used it as a practice for some of the ideas I learned from the course immediately afterward. 

This is the original. I was reasonably pleased with it: the bird's eye was in focus and I liked the way the colored feathers fanned out over the brown wing on the left side of the bird's image.

This is the first clip.

And this is the clip that I ended up using in the post.  I chose this one because I got rid of the fuzzy green blob on the right of the original, kept the triangular leaf in the foreground, and an unfocused green frame at the top of the image.

The class this week will include locations in Olympic and Mt. Rainier National Parks.  It is a three day course….lots of opportunity to learn about photography and the locations!