Henry Rifle Forums

The Pup and I decided to take a digital photography course at a local art school. It meets once a week for an hour with a total of 5 classes. Turns out she and I are the only students, so we are getting some individual instruction. Instructor is a photography professor at the local military college. We are both very impressed with him.

Had our second class this week. We are taking a photography outing each week to have photos ready for the next class. He didn't give us any specific assignment other than to take pictures and bring them ALL in. We visited the Beidler forest last week, and went to Cypress Gardens yesterday. I am playing around with editing, which will be the focus of the last half or so of the classes. Since I have experience with darkroom work, I am familiar with a lot of the processes in the editors, but a lot of it is Greek to me. I am able to generally improve the originals anywhere from a little to a bunch.

Here are a few I took.
On our first outing to the Beidler forest, the Pup blew me out of the water with her pics. I was a little afraid that if I started taking pictures with her that it would turn into a competition, and since I had a fair amount of experience with photography in the past, that it would be one sided. It is one sided, but she has the eye for it, as opposed to me. I'm good with that. One reason I got out of photography was that I felt my pictures weren't up to par with the amount of interest, experience and effort I put into it.

I like the butterflies!

Outstanding.

I am amazed at how parallel our thought processes run.

I used to sit quietly in our Virginia garden for hours, shooting shots of the butterflies, bees, various lizards, and flowers. I have a shot of mushrooms in my wallpaper file. I wish I could find a digital photography class to learn to use the very nice camera I bought. (First I need to buy better lenses.)

What camera do you have? The instructor has several Nikons. He has one of the new mirrorless Z series. Nice camera. Lens is old school in that it is heavily built. I'm sure it's a high dollar lens. The DX lenses on our Nikons provide very good images, but construction is not terribly robust. Then again, they were pretty cheap when bought as part of a bundle with the camera. I got the D3400 camera bundled with two lenses cheaper than the two lenses would have been if I had bought them separately. The only issue I have with the Nikon is they have a different type of RAW file that many editing programs will not open.

There are a number of options in our area for classes. You might check your local community college. They often have adult education classes either very reasonably or free. Out local CC allows old folks like you and me to take classes free.

Sir Henry wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 11, 2021 5:34 pm

I like the butterflies!

Unfortunately, they have a limited number of species in the butterfly house now. When we visited years ago they had a ton of different ones. They had to close the park a few years back due to hurricane damage. When they reopened, the variety of species went down to just a handful. Still, it's a great place to visit. Inexpensive entry fee, a beautiful section of swamp and gardens. They even have boats you can take out on the swamp. Several scenes in the Patriot were filmed there.

Here are a few more flutterbys.

Well, we had our last class this week. Instructor told the Pup she should look into selling her photos. We've been kicking around a few ideas on that, but need to get a backlog of images to work with first. Cart, horse........

I'm thinking about twisting my best friend's arm into running the boat down a couple of local creeks that have an abundance of wildlife and see what we can get.