Nature

Assignment Summary

This weekend my family took a trip to Niagra Falls so I decided to take advantage of the natural beauty of my surroundings and make my subject subject of the week nature.  I was able to take pictures all around the falls and the surrounding rapids as well as at a butterfly conservatory and an aviary in the city.  The changing light conditions meant that I had to constantly make adjustments to the "exposure triangle", lowering and raising the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed settings on my camera.  Outside and in the butterfly conservatory the natural light make it so that most of the times I had to reduce the exposure on my camera with a low ISO and a high f-stop.  Since we were introduced to the image manipulation tools of Gimp in class, I was able to utilize this program to edit many of my photos.  Most of the time I adjusted the color levels, either making the photo darker or lighter, or I used the stamp tool to cover up parts of a photo that were distracting to me.

Best Photo

I chose this picture because I really liked the brightness of the yellows and greens of the leaves and how it was split up by the boardwalk.  Originally there were people on the boardwalk but I used the stamp tool in Gimp to edit them out.

Photo Info

Aperture: f/8

Shutter Speed: 1/25 sec

ISO: 80

What I Learned

I learned quite a bit from this assignment.  I think that I finally became really good at adjusting the "exposure triangle" of ISO, shutter speed, and aperture so that I could capture the image that I envisioned in my mind.  I was also able to learn a good deal about Gimp and all that it has to offer by editing the majority of my pictures with it.  One of the biggest lessons I learned was that when attempting to photograph nature you have to work with what you're given.  You can't really control the amount of light so you have to constantly adjust your camera settings and a lot of the time things won't stay still for you so you have to always have the image capture button pressed halfway down so that you don't miss any of the spectacle that is nature.