Formal Assessment - People & Place

Well I received my formal notification of my results for People & Place 1 last night. I was very pleased to see I have passed with a Class 1 again, the same as for The Art of Photography. I didn't think I'd done quite as well as TAOP, so I was pleased that the assessors disagreed with me! I also appreciated the comments, one of which reads "Continuing to develop your personal style and take innovative risks will further strengthen your work". This I feel is an excellent comment and something I am working towards as I progress through the degree pathway. My other blog (for Digital Photography Practice) is being kept up to date, and now that I have finished the first module (Workflow) for that, I am taking some time out to do more reading and looking at other peoples work, which I am finding enlightening and inspiring.

Portraits

Off to the market again with camera and flash...

I asked this lady to pose for me and am quite pleased with this natural shot. Some minor post processing with curves, crop and removal of a small background imperfection. I like the narrow DOF which isolates her from the dark background which still has some interest, and she looks smart and fresh despite her age. I may try doing some alternate images (in post-processing) for this one...

Digital Photography Practice 1

Well I've enrolled on my new course, DPP 1 and am looking forward to my course material being delivered. I've also put in a large order on amazon so I'll have lots of reading to do in my (non-existent) spare time. Exciting. I'm starting a new blog and it's located here. Please visit some time and see how I'm doing. I'll keep posting the odd interesting (or not?) thing on this blog too.

Deleting Photos

Does anyone else feel a sense of guilt when deleting photos off the computer? I rarely do it, but as our computer has told me it has 1.5GB left of space on it, I have decided to have a cull... I often take a couple of shots when trying to get the right picture, but sometimes can't decide which I like best so just keep them all. I star the good ones and just filter to look at those, so never see the slightly blurry/out of focus/just not right photos. But really, it would be better to look at them all and get rid of the ones that are no good, but I find it hard. I'm rationalising it by saying, well I took it in the first place so I should be able to remove it, but I find it's particularly hard when it's of a loved one for example!

I think part of it is not having a good system for rating photos. I tend to 3 star anything I like and then occasionally give a 4 or 5 star to something really good, but I should use it more rigorously than that, and perhaps delete anything that doesn't get a star at all. I'd love to hear how other people get around the issue of taking thousands of photos and dealing with them afterwards without just buying more and more hard drive space!

However I must admit it feels a little cleansing to start with 150 photos in a folder and whittle it down to 50. It makes the browsing experience much more pleasant certainly! It's probably also good to realise that while it's great to make the most of digital and take lots of photos from different angles of the same scene, it's better to take time at the taking and get it right with one or two shots. Something I'm learning as I progress in my studies perhaps...

But there are some photos that are keepers no matter what technical quality they are... my son must be the most photographed little boy ever (or close to...)

Dress ups