It was the first time, I’d been able to attend a photo meetup. The class was made up of pros and enthusiasts, so it was cool to see some of the gear the pros were carrying around. After about an hour class, we started taking photos of a local area model. The weather was nice, but we had a slight overcast, so I really didn’t get to practice taking outdoor portraits in direct sunlight. It was good that we were able to practice right after the class, because the information was still fresh in our heads.

I used my Nikkor 50mm 1.8 and the Nikkor 55-200mm for the photos below. I shot in RAW which came in handy because the original version second photo was extremely overblown. I tried a couple of things to save it and came out with the high contrast black and white.

Overall, I have to say I’m pleased with the results. It gives me a little confidence to go out and find more people (other than my kids) to photograph. As time permits, I’ll definitely be going to other meetups and will post the photos here.

The two black & white photos are some I took while we were out for another day at the park. In these economic times, the park is a great way for them to have fun and stay out of my wallet at the same time.

The biggest thing I had to remember was to decrease the aperture because my first set of pictures came out all white. I thought my camera was on the fritz, but realized I had it set to 2.8 for some indoor shots I was taking earlier. I lowered it to 8 and everything was all good. I also threw in some black and white shots.

The first one is a photo of my office hallway. I happened to be walking down the hall and thought, “this would make a cool picture”. I stood at one end of the hall and shot a couple of images at 55mm, then I zoomed out to 18mm. The shots always look decent on the viewfinder, but when I got home all the shots didn’t look right. Then I decided to rotate the image and convert it to black & white. I cropped, adjusted the contrast and added a vignette to darken it up a little to get the image below.

This second set of pictures was taken at a church pumpkin patch. My idea was to get the sun flare behind my son with him looking into the camera. Well, he was getting fussy and looked up instead of at the camera. I took a picture just so I could get something and move on. When editing the picture I tried a couple of things, but nothing worked. I couldn’t get the color to look right, so I took a couple of days to think of something else. Once again converting to black & white helped again. I also adjusted the contrast and got rid of some of the sun flare in the right top corner.

Here’s the picture on a magazine cover that I got done at Walgreens. I would have liked for him to be on Jet or Ebony, but TV Guide worked for now. He really is going to be an entertainer. The kid loves attention.

For the post processing I added some contrast, cropped and a circular vignette. I thought the vignette caused some of the pictures to be darker than they should, but I think that may be due to my monitor. My favorite picture out of the group is the one of my youngest son walking over to help his big brother with the bike after a crash.