On Monday, March 28, I attended the first session in a ten week photography class at Photo Center NW in Capitol Hill, Seattle. Each week we will be given an assignment and need to produce a contact sheet with our top 20 photos. Of those 20, we must pick our three favorites and make 8×10 prints to be discussed and critiqued in the next class session. My intent is to pick at least one of those top three and post it here.
The assignment this week was rather open – just go take lots of shots using only manual settings. I actually have preferred to use manual settings since I started shooting with a SLR, so that was nothing new for me. But what was new was also turning off the auto-focus. I’d played around with it a little with old lenses, but not when using my main lens. It took some getting used to, but once I did, I found myself liking it a lot. It forces me to slow down and really pay a lot more attention to what is in the frame, how it is composed, and just what is it I’m trying to capture. I may continue focusing manually when it’s appropriate. Though I learned that it will definitely take some skill and practice (or a fast switch to auto) to successfully capture that flock of birds that blurred past me unexpectedly.
This week’s choice was taken on a damp and dreary Seattle spring day. I had been hoping for some dry weather to take some shots downtown at the public library (love those geometric patterns and lines). But the weather was not going to cooperate so that will have to wait for another day. About an hour before sunset I decided to just throw on my rain coat and head to Beach Drive in West Seattle.
I started out with lots of boring shots of gray water, a gray rocky beach with a nice gray sky and not much else. Until I stopped looking at the scene as a whole and tried looking more closely.
Even before I got this home and on my computer I knew that it was going to end up being black and white. On such a dreary day, it was practically monochrome already.
