Invested Living: Fall 2012 Filoli Seasons Photography Class

My husband and I love to garden, and consider ourselves lucky to have a place like Filoli nearby to be members of. The perks of membership are many, including having access to the gardens all year round; a 10% discount at a local nursery; and taking classes / attending events at discounted rates. These are just some of the many perks we enjoy throughout the year.

This is my second year of taking the Seasons of Filoli photography class - a series of four classes that take place over the year - one for each season. I hesitated before signing up for this year's series (which started fall of this year and goes through summer of 2013) - due both to cost and because I'd taken it before. I am so glad I did though. (In fact, three other folks from last year's class are taking this series again too.) Whereas last year's series met one day for each season, this year's meets for two. This gives us plenty of time to go over the concept being taught AND delve into the world of editing - a science all of its own.

Learning about photography is like learning a foreign language. The more you "hear" the language - immerse yourself in it - hang out with "native speakers", the more it soaks in and the more you learn. When I first started taking classes about a year ago - it was overwhelming. Aperture, exposure, F stops, stepping up, stepping down, metering, stops, iso, shutter speeds....whhhaaatt? How does any of that translate to what I need to do with the the camera to get a nice picture?

I remember feeling very overwhelmed in last year's fall Filoli class. None of the pictures I took that day turned out well. I blamed it on not having a tripod. I wanted to work on everything - and as a result - focused on nothing. What a difference a year makes! I came to this year's class (minus tripod) with the intention of working on composition and exposure, and as luck would have it - exposure is exactly the topic our instructor Susan Rosner chose to explore in class! (I quickly let go of composition though upon realizing how much there was to learn and experiment with the camera with metering and exposure.)

I learned so much over the next two days. Instead of feeling overwhelmed like last year - I felt as though I had a small enough handle on the "lingo" - a base of knowledge (albeit it small) - that enabled me to ask questions that took me to whole new level of learning on the topic. Not only on how the camera works - but on editing too! (on a side note - I invested in Adobe Lightroom earlier this year - but up until now - was only using it to catalog and do some rudimentary editing - without fully understanding all what I was doing on the editing side.) Don't get me wrong - I'm still very much a beginner in both - but I have bit more knowledge - and you know how dangerous that can be!

So here are some of my first real efforts at photorgraphing and editing with the knew bit of knowledge I gained this weekend. I still have a lot to learn (for example the pictures at the start of this blog tuned out more red/purple than I intended) but oh how fun the learning process is!

Busy Bees