Class Assignment at Farmers Branch Park

I enrolled in a photography class at SMU in Plano, which has been really great! It is a total of 5 3-hour classes and one field trip, and our trip was this Saturday morning at Farmers Branch park in Farmers Branch, TX (a suburb a few over to the southwest from Plano). I arrived at 7 AM, and just missed the best part of the sunrise, but still was able to get a few silhouetted shots in mainly for practice since I had missed the really great reds/oranges by about 5 minutes.

The park was pretty neat - it had a nice stream running through it, with an old (1843) cemetery next to it, along with some wooded areas.

I liked the way the sunlight was captured in the fountain even though I blew it out and the water ended up being a bit overexposed.

Most of my shots today were done in manual, and I still need a lot of practice to get the exposure just right - thank goodness for Photoshop! I was able to correct most of the sunlight overexposure in this shot, but I don't mind the part behind the memorial - it kinda looks neat.

This one is meant to be viewed rotated clockwise 90 degrees, but this blog automatically rotated it the wrong way for no reason - ah well. I don't think it looks as quirky the way the blog is showing it, so you'll just have to turn your head to get the effect I liked. :-)

Nothing overly special about this shot - I just happened to notice that the break in the branches allowed the steeple to fit nicely in that slot.

I tried my hand at some macro flower shots. Luckily the clouds had started rolling in so the yellow stands out a bit more.

I know this is all busy, but I liked the way the flag is out there in the background adding some unexpected color and contrast to the clouds and branches. I actually like both ways for presenting it.

I believe I shot this at ISO100, f/8 for 1/4 sec (with a tripod) to get the silky water. Again, thankfully it was really cloudy so I could get away with the longer exposure.

One of the people in my class. I really feel like I need to practice a whole lot more when it comes to taking portraits, and I really want to get much better at it. So thankfully a few of us felt the same way and worked on taking some pictures of one another. Taking pictures of scenes and landscapes comes much easier to me.

Just so people don't think that we're joking when we talk about how much people here love Texas!

I should probably crop this a bit at the bottom so I'm not violating the magic rule of thirds.

I got lucky with a couple of the in-flight pictures. I don't know how the folks who get those fancy National Geographic pictures of flying birds do it - it is tricky to try and focus on their eyes and compose the shot, even with firing a burst of shots. I think the cloudy day helped with some of these duck shots since it made their colors stand out more.

The thing I like about this picture is how the wake looks, and the bubbles in the wake kind of looking like they merge into the spotted area of the duck.

For my assignment, I have to send our instructor 5 shots by this Wednesday. I'm terrible at narrowing things down (as evidenced by my long blog posts) :-) so I'm really going to need to crack down and pick just 5 - feel free to help me out with suggestions!