Carolyn Erickson

Lesson 1 was about composition. Jodie wrote about filling up the frame with your subject, the rule of thirds, leading lines and triangles. The first assignment was to take an abstract photo, and the second was to take pictures of a subject from all different angles and post a few of them.

I did that, but this weekend I also played around some more with framing subjects and including leading lines. Her example shots are soooo neat I just had to go out and try to make some of my own. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, so I would love to get your comments about any problems you see, either here or at the Morguefile forums. My goal is to take fantastic pictures someday, and decent pictures now.

So, first: My neighbors have some delicious-looking peaches just barely out of my reach. (They’re very nice people and I’m sure they’ll offer us some eventually, but for the purposes of the photo, I wanted to show something I could just almost-but-not-quite get. Kind of a metaphor for my attempts at learning photography. lol) A round knot hole and a vertical slot between fence planks provide my frames. I’m just not sure whether it’s obvious that I’m shooting through a fence. The frames are supposed to be somewhat out-of-focus, but do you think I should have tried to get at least a little more detail in the wood? And what about the color? Exposure? If there’s anything you know that I don’t know, I’m all for hearing it.

Man, I don’t know about you but now I’m in the mood for fresh peaches. Yum.

Less tasty but hopefully as interesting are a couple different photos composed with leading lines. After twenty-zillion shots, I picked these two. Tell me what you think. Is there anything I should have thought of but didn’t? Let me know.

I had to crop both of these. The first picture showed a sliver of my car’s dashboard, since I wasn’t about to ask my husband to stop a vehicle bound for the lake. It’s all about getting there, right? Anyway, I had to crop that out. To be completely honest, I didn’t even notice the combine on the right when I snapped the photo. But I like it!

The second scene of the shore was hard for me to capture. There was a ladder-like line of moss-covered rocks running down the length of the lake shoreline and visually ended at a bluff. I wasn’t sure where to stand to take the photo, nor how to line up the angles. Now I know. In that situation, I should have made sure the horizon was - well - horizontal. It would have saved me from needing the straighten tool in my photo editor, and then the crop tool, which means lining everything up according to the rule of thirds again.

But it’s a learning experience, right? Now I know. They call it horizon for a reason.

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