It snowed today in Missoula.  Snowed!  Can you believe it?  We’re not even at that high of an elevation.   It’s crazy.  Thankfully, it’s suppose to be in the 70′s by the weekend.  Highs in the 40′s today and tomorrow though, with rain.  Yuck.

Yesterday, was a long day of classes, but I learned a lot.  In the morning, the discussion was primarily about metering modes.  I have to admit, that’s not something I knew much about.  I knew there were different modes I could use, but that’s pretty much it.  I didn’t know what the differences were between them.  Now I know all about it and I’ve discovered I’ve been using the wrong one all this time.  I’ve been using the one that is probably the most inaccurate in most situations.  Oh, well. Now I know.

My second class yesterday was Lighting with Allison Leach (who I talked about in a previous post).  We basically discussed the different types of light and began talking about how to control it.  She showed us a pretty cool trick for estimating the number of stops of light between a well lit area and a low light area, such as full sunlight versus the shade.  You use your camera to meter off your hand while standing in the sun and then meter again off your hand while standing in the shade.  The difference between the two will give you the range of light in your photo.  Anything over about 5 stops will be too great of range for your camera to record properly and you’ll have to use some sort of light modifier (scrim/diffuser or reflector) to try and reduce the overall range.  It’s a pretty nice trick.

Today, I had a 4 hour class discussing nothing except lenses.  And that was probably too short.  It’s amazing how many things you have to consider when buying one.  There were a lot of lens characteristics I never really thought about in the past, but can make a big difference.  Unfortunately, a lot of it comes down to what type of shooting you will be doing before you can know which characteristics are the most important and which you can get by without.  It’s almost like the more you know, the harder the decision becomes.  But, the more you know, the more likely you are to save some serious cash by avoiding the lenses that are more than you really need.  Right now, I think I have all the lenses I really need, but I’m sure that will change by the end of the summer.

The rest of the day was spent working in Lightroom.   Most of that was a review for me since I’ve been using it for over year already.  But, they covered some best practices that I wasn’t following so some good came from it.

My schedule gets progressively lighter the rest of the week so I might actually have a chance to go do some shooting outside of class.

Be Sociable, Share!

•