Photography & Paintings -- creative urges

Earlier this year I'd made it a goal to learn how to use my camera -- to be able to take it off the fully auto settings and get more interesting, sophisticated pictures. So far, I haven't followed up on that. Well. I did order a DVD instructional manual for my camera, but what I found, watching it twice, was that I need to understand the basic principles of photography first, before I can understand how to manipulate them on my camera. You know: aperture, shutter speed, white balance, etc. I got a little confused :-(

Last week I was emailing with a woman who was in our birthing class; she's had her baby too, and she sent a link to the local photographer they'd hired to take newborn pictures of him. Well, I don't come from a family that has ever had studio portraits done. Ever. It didn't even occur to me to do this, even though our birthing class teacher had given us all vouchers for the photographer, for a very nice discount. I guess I thought I could take pictures that were "good enough." Well. As soon as I saw the photographer's blog, I realized the drastic difference between professional portraits and my snapshots. My oh my. I immediately contacted the photographer to hire her to take some pictures before Clementine gets much bigger, but beyond that, it made me want more than ever to follow through on my goal of becoming a better photographer!

So I signed up for a night class for this semester. Yay! My dad is going to take it with me, and I'm really excited! It's a basics of digital photography class, for SLR, covering all those things I need to learn: f-stop and depth of field, shutter speed, ISO, etc. Perfect. I'm sure I will be posting *assignments* here over the next few months.

I'm also feeling a real urgency to do a little painting. It's been so long! I used to paint daily, but I can't recall the last time I uncapped a tube of oil paint. Cheap craft paint, yes, and that's not nothing. Anyway, my old "style" and techniques were way too painstaking for my current life style . . .

. . . and it's been long enough now since I've worked that way that I think it's feasible I could begin anew, with an all-new style, something much simpler and more suited to the minutes in the day I have available. First step: get a work station set up in the [newly decluttered] studio, with some small canvasses prepped, some ink, some acrylics and collage materials.

Really. I'm going to do it. Like, one-hour paintings instead of one-month paintings like I used to do. I'll show you :-)

(And by the way, I'm writing with a sleeping baby in my lap again, just like in the photo from the last post. It's becoming a thing. Not ergonomic, but very cute!)