i graduated!

well... from my online photography class

but i am still pretty excited.  

i have thrown countless parties

but have yet to have great pictures of them...

for a couple reasons.

usually because they are for my kiddies 

and i can hardly ignore the birthday girls

and their honored guests, can I?

but also because, until recently, 

i had never had a great SLR camera.

(thanks, mimi!  it certainly helps 

to have a photographer as one of my moms

who upgrades and then spreads the wealth 

with her slightly older models.)

anyway, i knew, with the schedules we have, 

an online class would be quite ideal...

and it was!  

it still was slightly tricky because, 

as fellow mothers know, it is HARD to concentrate 

on actually learning anything
with little people at your feet.  

and unfortunately most of our homework

had to be done during the day 

because the whole class was done without flash.

here are some of my homework samples.

it's supposed to be blurry

so stop sitting there thinking i need a refund!  :)

this was slow shutter speed. 

she wanted us to be able to tell the difference.

 fast shutter speed, complete with frozen hair
(that was one of the comments the instructor left)

try very hard to ignore my
prison rec. yard of a backyard. 
the chain link fence will be
a thing of the past this summer.. hopefully!


next lesson.... apertures!

it basically means if you want

your subject clear and background blurred.

okay, that's not technically what it "means"

but for MY intents and purposes it does. 

the next class was terribly scary.

100% manual.  ick! 

not sure that i'll ever use that again.

there was light metering and other nonsense

and actual equations that i haven't used since

Mr. Watkins's 10th grade class.

thankfully it somehow worked out

(probably because she was distracted

by the cute buckles on my shoes!)

this was the rule of thirds.

everything need not always be in the center

and makes for a more interesting photo

and i agree!

(a special thank you to the doll for sitting still

as my original model kept wandering off to the slide!)

anyway... it was fun and i feel like i learned a lot,

but I really can't wait to study over the material again

in a non-May month because it gets crazy around here.