Last week, Aimee’s lesson was on The Rule of Thirds and beginning composition for photography.

Basically, the picture should be divided into thirds both horizontally and vertically, and the subject(s) of the photo should be on (not in between as I previously thought) those lines or at the intersection of two of them.

Hmm! Who knew?

Here are my practice shots.

Unfortunately, I woke up to hoar frost here this morning. Beautiful. Great for pictures. But I’m really ready for green!!

You can see that the first picture had objects on the vertical (left) and horizontal (bottom) lines.

I thought this picture had a couple of horizontal lines covered. This is the view behind my house, by the way.

And I think this picture is a good example of her lesson on how diagonal lines create interest and movement. The tree on the left is a diagonal and the tree line fading off into the distance is also a subtle diagonal line as the tree line is moving away from the camera.

Such cool tricks!! We are going skiing this week and I’m going to practice her spring vacation tips on taking pictures in bright light and holiday pictures.

I’m a little bit behind on my photography posts, but I have been working on it!

Last week, Aimee posted a lesson on white balance and it was something I really needed.

Basically, you can set your white balance manually, but to begin with, it is probably best just to get used to the camera settings and options for white balance to see what they can do first.

I used my camera in manual mode for these, as I’m getting quite used to it now.  I placed my props in a well lit corner of my living room (although it was cloudy) and started shooting, going through each of the options my camera has for white balance and then metering until I was balanced.

The auto worked quite well.

The setting for cloudy made it a bit too yellow and flash-y looking.

As did the flash setting.

The incandescent setting adds blue to make up for the yellow in incandescent lighting.  Since there wasn’t any, it turned quite blue!

Again, the shade setting added a bit of a flash looking yellow.

The setting for sunlight worked.  Which makes sense since that was what I was using- a naturally well-lit area.

It is so interesting to see and figure out what the camera will do for you in different types of lighting conditions.  I am going to keep practicing using my white balance options in different lighting conditions (use the incandescent in that type of light and see if the picture turns out, etc.).

Happy snapping!