My Fist Assignment: Animals

For the animals assignment, I had a great advantage as opposed to the rest of the class. My family owns four pets, two cats and two dogs, so I had the chance to get a lot of pictures for the photo assignment within my own home. What I did was let my dogs roam around outside at sunrise, and after I had adjusted the ISO I followed them around and tried to get pictures of them doing various things. The dogs had wandered all over my yard, and my yard and the yards next door, and I had received some strange looks from my neighbors. Some of the things the dogs had done were explore my neighbor's backyard, where there was work equipment that the dogs were curious about, which is visible in some of the pictures, and the dogs also ran amok all over my driveway, where I had taken some of the pictures with adjusted shutter speed, to capture them at play. The next day I also took some more pictures, and I figured that it would provide me with some more interesting pictures if I had taken some of the cats, but there were only a few situations that the cats were doing something worth taking a picture of.

I had gotten around one hundred fifty pictures in all, with one hundred of them being decent enough to save to the computer, and I had some very good pictures within that hundred. One of the biggest issues I had was balancing the ISO with the shutter speed in areas where there was abundant sunlight. This was probably the main cause for having to abandon fifty or so pictures that were either too bright, too dark, or too blurry. Another issue I had that was less significant was getting a picture of what the dogs were doing. I had a small window of opportunity to get into the right position to take a picture of the dogs, and about half of the time they would run off to their next activity before I was ready. My overall goal was to take at least one hundred pictures, and have at least twenty that would be worth putting in the power point, so that I would have a selection to choose from. I had more or less achieved this goal, and I had gotten near one hundred fifty pictures total, and there were a little less than twenty that were good enough to put into the slideshow. Although it was a very hard choice, I thought that my best picture was the one of my dog, Cali, sitting down in the grass begging for a treat. It wasn't blurry, and the balance was just right. I thought the picture was interesting because the grass she was sitting on was an interesting shade of green, and it made her stand out in the rest of the picture. Also Cali was siting in a position where the rule of thirds could be used. Overall, I thought the assignment was very fun, and i am looking forward to my next one.

Best Picture:
ISO: 125
Aperture: 2.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1000