Photo Safari

Last year I bought a DSLR, sort of on a whim. It was one of those, I'm bored oh hey let's buy something sort of days and i went with a Canon XS after doing a little research. I really would have liked to splurge more but boyfriend reminded me how easily I often lose interest in things and this could be one of them. Plus many reviews on beginning photography mentioned it's not so much the body as the lenses. So I went with a fairly basic body that was suggested for beginners and figured I could get more lenses if I got into it. And if I really got into it, I could get a sweeter one. So of course life pans out as usual and I barely use it/know how to even use it so when this opportunity came up to take a few hour photo class in Chicago, I figured why not? It was held in Millennium Park and within the first ten minutes I already learned a ridiculous amount about my camera. Ok, it's stuff I kind of knew but didn't really get how to achieve it with my camera. So after brief discussions on things about our camera, we went to do some shooting. We started off with things in motion, keeping them clear with a blurry background. A lot harder than it seems, but really fun and exciting when you get a good picture... For every like 5 pictures I took, 2 would probably be pretty good, 1 would be ok, and 2 would be really not good. Here's one of the good.

Then we headed over to AT&T Plaza to shoot some pics. We learned a cool way to shoot words, making it go from focused to unfocused. I definitely didn't get it at first but our teacher was really good at the one-on-one help and after a few minutes, I totally got the gist of it.

AT&T Plaza is where Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate is. It's more commonly referred to as "The Bean". But seriously, this thing is pretty cool. I loooove how it reflects all the awesome architecture downtown.So this family was doing a family portrait session at the bean too, and seriously, look how cutie this little girl is. She's taking a picture of the photographer th

Then we went over to Lurie Garden for some up close photo taking with the macro function. It actually took quite a few photos to get used to the macro function as it's awfully particular about wanting to taking a photo of what you want it to take. And then the flash would pop up thinking you needed more light and then just blow the photo out. Plus this was also a lesson our teacher was trying to encourage us with of not taking photos in the center and using the idea of thirds which is more interesting.


Lastly, we headed to Crown Fountain designed by Jaume Plensa. It's two 50-foot glass block towers sitting on either end of a shallow reflecting pool that children (and adults) enjoy playing in to cool off in this ridiculous heat. On the other side there are images projected on LED screens of people and what not. It's pretty cool.
So here we practiced taking pictures of falling water which was kind of fun when I came home and looked at the pictures (its a bit hard on an LCD screen). This was taken at 1/15 exposure time.
This was taken at at 1/1000 exposure time. Love how you can see the falling drops much better here.
So after three hours with around 200 photos taken, I came back with a much better understanding of my camera and maybe 125 pretty neat pictures. Plus it was a good time spent downtown.