Lesson 1. Submission

[Santiago Santos Valle]

Lesson 1 assingment.

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Hi Santiago,

Thanks for sending in your first assignment to the Icon Photography School student forum. I’m glad you’ve taken the time to submit your first assignment. You’re on your way to taking better photos already. I don’t want to get off to a rough start but I would like you re-shoot this assignment.

Please find something boring and make it look interesting. Try different perspectives, compositions, and just have fun with it.

If you don’t want to re-shoot this, no worries, just go ahead and move onto the next assignment. I just want to be sure you know what this lesson is all about before you move on.

Try to make something mundane into something you’d hang on your wall. Don’t worry about camera settings for now just worry about what you’re shooting.

The problem here is that you’ve basically turned off the lights and put some stuff in the frame. The other problem I have is I can’t really tell which of these is one you want to be the more interesting image…

Whatever the case I’m not here to stifle you, I just want you learn and have fun doing it.

Let me know what you think. You can ask questions here, or submit more images, or just move onto the next assignment. Do whatever you want, but if you want to take better photos I suggest you follow my lead 😉

[Santiago Santos Valle]

It is fine, I am here to learn, so I will repeat the assignment. Sometimes I have problems to abstract myself when I take the pictures, maybe this first attempt shows that very clearly. I will work on a new picture as soon as possible.

[Duncan Rawlinson]

No worries! What do you mean by abstract yourself?

I look forward to your next submission.

Thank you.

[Santiago Santos Valle]

Here is the second try for the assignment. I hope this time things are improving.
I meant that it is hard for me to concentrate on taking the picture many times so it is very common that my pictures lack of emotion or interest.

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Hey Santiago,

These are indeed much much better.

A couple things to note here.

First the orangey yellow color of both photographs is because your camera’s automatic white balance doesn’t know how to make sense of the colors it’s seeing. White balance is a funny thing and you will learn more about color temperature and theory as you progress through the course but suffice it to say that you camera is kind of dumb. Well it’s dumb when you compare it to the human brain. You see the human brain knows what colors things should be. If you see a piece of paper you know it’s white and you see it that way. But a camera doesn’t know anything so it has to try to figure out what color is what.

Understanding white balance is one quick way to improve your images. The easiest thing to do is to match the white balance setting on your camera to the light source you are shooting in. Suffice it to say it’s a complicated subject but for now your best bet is to match the light source to the white balance setting. So if you’re shooting in sunlight set your white balance to the little sun icon. Incandescent light? Use the little light bulb icon.

The more you learn about photography the more you will understand just how important color is for nice photographs.

So that explains why these photos have weird color… Your camera guessed and it guess wrong.

More importantly you’ve done the assignment much better this time.

Here is another quick tip for making your photos way better almost immediately.

Add people.

For some reason when folks start learning photography they have this desire to remove people from their images. I’m not sure why that is but I see it all the time. This is a mistake. Add people to your images even if it’s just a hand holding one of these cups. Adding people almost always makes a photograph more interesting and easier to relate to as the viewer.

Overall nice job here.

Work on your white balance and don’t forget to add people.

See you on the next assignment!

😉

[Author]

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