Saturday, April 2, 2011

BibleTech Day One

Last weekend Ed & I headed down to Seattle for the 4th annual BibleTech conference that Logos hosts for all sorts of companies involved in biblical & religious technology. You might remember that last year we had the pleasure of going to San Jose, CA for this conference. Even though we had to stay in rainy & cold WA (though Friday was beautiful) this year, it was still an awesome weekend.

For me. Ed, on the other hand, went to a conference that for the most part was not that interesting. Except for some parts that were. And he doesn’t really try to explain them to me because I wouldn’t understand anyway. So I just say that he went to boring meetings and I partied. It worked out well.

I was So. Excited. for Friday because I had talked a few of the other Logos wives into taking a photography class with me at the Museum of Flight.

_MG_4045I had a GREAT time! Even though I know a lot about photography and my camera, it was a great refresher course and I had some questions answered.

_MG_4041

This was the most exciting part of the class for me. See that part on the screen where it says “SPOT”? Yeah, I don’t have that on my camera. When I bought the camera, I thought, I don’t need that. It was the major difference between the two cameras we were looking at. Well, I had been wishing I had that spot metering on a number of occasions.

BUT this guy taught me how to use “EVALUATIVE” in MANUAL mode and have almost the same effect as the spot metering. Woo-hoo! Most of you know not of what I speak, but that’s OK. Just be happy with me.

We spent over 4 hours in class that morning, with just one 15 minute break, so by the time it was over, we were on information overload. Especially the gals I was with who didn’t already know half the information.

After a quick lunch at Chipotle,

photo-3(iphone picture)

we headed back to the Museum of Flight for the “Photo Safari” portion of the class. I was uber excited about this, but it didn’t turn out as I had hoped. I thought we would walk around downtown, in groups of maybe 10-20 and take lots of amazing Seattle pictures. But no, we stayed at the Museum of Flight, with about 100 people, and practiced different modes on the camera. The instructor would give an assignment and then we had to go off and try it out. I did always try it out, but then I would do my own thing and practice the new stuff I had learned. It was still beneficial, but not as amazing as I had hoped.

_MG_4067

Inside the Museum of Flight, the assignment was to experiment with ISO. I spent most of the time helping the other gals I was with and playing around with manual mode and the evaluative metering, which is how I managed to get this picture of the airplane without making it a silhouette or blowing out the background. Woo-hoo!

_MG_4079

We also got to wander around the Museum a bit, and it is a pretty amazing place. I hope to take the girls there once Elise is a bit older. They’d love it.

_MG_4094

This was our main instructor. He was really smart and I really appreciated his opinions about photography. He believes in doing as much SOOC photography as possible and as little post-production as possible. Love that.

Then we headed outside to practice aperture. I shoot mostly in aperture priority mode, so this was pretty easy for me.

_MG_4123

I wandered around, trying other stuff.

_MG_4108

Look at that! Detail in the clouds!! I was beside myself with excitement about this new-found ability of my camera!

Ever wonder what a few dozen people taking pictures outside the Museum of Flight looks like? Pretty much like this:

_MG_4109

The other visitors to the Museum were rather befuddled watching the whole thing.

_MG_4115These are two of the gals who made the day so much fun!

Then we had to practice shutter priority mode, which we did by panning. This was very difficult with this many people. Our poor instructor must have run back & forth 50 times. It’s terribly difficult to pan when there are people in front of you, though.

_MG_4141

_MG_4179

Later the group moved out to the sun to take stop-motion shots of the female instructor’s hair bouncing as she ran along the group. I chose to stand in the background and allow more room for all those other new & budding photographers.

Here’s an example of a picture I would have taken before I learned about metering in manual mode, followed by a picture taken with my new metering information. Notice that there again is more details in the clouds in the second picture. Both are nice. Neither are perfect. But it demonstrates what I learned.

_MG_4230_MG_4231

_MG_4220_MG_4227

At this point it was beginning to get cold and the sun went behind the clouds. The instructor was going on and on about who knows what. Tam and I went inside for a bit, made pressed pennies and poked around in the gift shop. We came out, he was STILL talking!

We ended up just leaving eventually because he was way over the time and we were freezing. We had to warm up, so we went to, where else? Starbucks!

We then headed back to the hotel to freshen up and get a couple other gals to head out for dinner. The guys were planning to be in meetings until about 9:00, so we headed off to Bellevue for a very fun and eventful evening, which I will blog about later, but I need my buddy TAMARA to send me some of her pictures first.

1 comment:

Melissa said...

Glad you had fun at the class and learned some new things. I should try the evaluative mode too, maybe it would work better for me for not getting blown out skies. I know there is a way to work with spot metering other than focus points but I would actually need to read the manual :)