Nature Boy and the Photography Course

Got pretty ill this week with a stomach virus and for several days the only thing of any interest aside from watch Curb Your Enthusiasm replays on HBO was taking Goldie for long walks with my camera. As such, this week’s photos feature a lot of shot of Discovery Bay wildlife. In fact I started taking lots of pictures of birds, then spending my days trying to identify them. Yes, I was very bored. To pass the time, I thought I would read through a decent looking free online photography course that I found. Lesson one of the course focuses entirely on composition, making no mention at all of camera technicalities, and finishes up with a couple of assignments based on the lesson content. Going out with my camera and this lesson fresh in my mind really changed the way I approached my photographs, and particularly how I chose and cropped a few of the final shots.

The full course, by Jodie Coston, is available here.

It's well written, easy to follow and is essentially a very basic photography course. It seems to me that if you are a beginner, it would be a perfect place to start. If you are at my stage of starting to become comfortable composing, capturing and cropping photographs yet far from considering yourself a photographer, it really helps re-enforce some vital rules. Even if you are a bit of a pro it never hurts to revisit the basics. However, if you are perfect, just ignore it.

With that, here are last weeks photographs. FYI photos 5 & 6 are my attempts at the assignments for the course.















- Joe

This week's offerings

The weeks keep flying by and the photographs stacking up. Got a new tripod this week so managed to pull off a decent panorama and some low-light/night shots. Also, in my quest to become a master of my SB600 I found a great blog called Strobist which caters for everybody from total douchebags like myself to strobe masters who love nothing more than to sit around all day talking about light placement and umbrellas. On the downside all it has done is add to the list of stuff I want to buy .i.e Remote triggers, strobe stands, umbrellas etc etc. Oh well, in time...

Anyway, here y'are:

Take care

Joe

Another Week in Images

Okay, so it's a little late this week, I have been pretty busy and only just got around to uploading about 1 weeks worth of photographs today! Photowise it's been pretty exciting. I cleaned my sensor (see my last blog entry) and I also bought a new Tripod which means I can go out and get some nice Hong Kong nightscapes and finally experiment with HDR processing. I also really got down and dirty with my SB600 strobe flash with pretty successful results. Here's this weeks offerings inlcuding a trip to Lamma Island, Samantha's hands, some shoes and a certain over-photographed rabbit:















Peace!

- Joe

Project365! That's Right!

Hey ho.
I mentioned on my post here a few weeks back that I would be starting a project 365 photographic pursuit this year, and I have.

WHAT?

For those who don't know, Project365 is a nifty little idea I noticed a while back which involves picking one photograph a day, for 365 days and displaying them on an online photo site like Flickr.

WHY?

Well, there are a bunch of reasons why I am doing this. The most obvious being that it will be a cool picture diary of a year of my life. This year stands to be pretty exciting what with some great trips abroad planned and life generally being pretty cool at the moment. On top of this though, it is a great chance to expand my photographic skills. Some days I will probably only take a quick cameraphone snap of something that has interested me on the way to work, but on other days I might go on a 5 hour hike to take a painstaking planned photograph of rare beetles mating with my SLR. So the photos themselves stand to be a bit of a mixture, and already I have some pretty varying snaps from me sitting on an elephant in Thailand (cool...) to me sitting back at my desk at work (not so cool...).

WELL?

Either way, if you are interested the photos will uploaded regularly to:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joehastings

Now I just need to get a hold of a 365 page photo album so I can print off the outcome at the end of the year.

Enjoy!!!
Joe

P.s. I will be updating the blog with a little bit on my Thailand trip either today or tomorrow too. It was an awesome trip but WAY too short...