Photography 101

Sunset behind the Coyote Mountains, 10/13

One of our mottos at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum is that if you have to go to work- you should enjoy yourself. If you are going to have an event at work, you should really enjoy yourself. So this Saturday we enjoyed ourself at work by holding a Photography 101 class. A photographer from El Centro came out and talked to seven eager students about photographic tricks that can help out even amateurs like me. Most of us had the little "point and click" type of digital cameras that we thought meant we couldn't do more than point and shoot. Well, instead we started experimenting with all the buttons and options on our cameras that none of us had ever played with.

Sunset with the 'night' setting

Coyote Mountains with some gold, even though the purple didn't go through

                                                                          One of my regrets is that I can never get my pictures to show people what I'm seeing here. Especially when it comes to sunsets. I can't get the colors to mimic what I see when I watch the sun set. The purples and golds just don't come out. And I'm not a visually artistic person so it never really occurred to me to try for the more artsy, close up type of shots you see some people do. So I experimented with some of the different settings: landscape, dusk/dawn, sunset, close-up. My little Nikon doesn't seem to have setting controls for speed, just light, and I decided that while I can use practice (because let's face it, my pictures aren't that good)- the different settings don't always make much difference to the picture quality. But the class got me thinking and interested in experimenting with my shots.

Our geoglyph sculpture at sunset

Check out our museum's Facebook page and blog to see some of the cool shots other students took:
http://ivdesertmuseum.blogspot.com/2012/10/sunset-photography-event.html

 Today Jessica and I decided to take our new found willingness to mess around with our camera settings and headed out into the desert for a hike. There are some things that can still never be replicated. The panorama of desert and mountains. The jackrabbits that went running off when we came through and went way too fast for us to catch any pictures of them. But other things worked out. The sky came out amazingly blue. We played around with angles and close-ups to get different and cool views of cactus. I experimented with framing windmills with cacti in shots the way I did with the full moon a few weeks ago. Plenty of the shots came out badly but that's the great thing about digital photography isn't it? You hook the camera up to the computer, look at your shots and delete what you don't like. No waiting, no wasted film. And the only ones who suffer are you guys, because I post way more pictures than before and you have to look at them and pretend they are cool.

Barrel cactus and ocotillo on a ridge

Artsy cactus angle

Windmills and cacti

Cholla flowers