amateur photography | Life Outside of Texas

With less than a week until I leave, I’ve been thinking a lot about my upcoming trip back to Texas. One of the best parts about visiting home is getting precious time with family. Unfortunately, my niece will be in Florida this summer so I won’t get to see her. She just turned 10 and it’s amazing how much she’s been changing while I’m away.

Each visit home flies by because I spend most of my time catching up with loved ones, running errands and trying to get things in order to leave again. When I was back in Texas in March, I tried to tone things down a bit. I stopped making plans with people and let them make plans with me and it worked out well. This opened up a lot more free time for me and I was able to relax a little more.

I was really lucky with my timing because I was able to be back during soccer season. It was my my niece’s first season to play. She is a great little player and it was so enjoyable to watch her.

Like any proud aunt, I took my camera to the games. I took these photos before I had my photography class so I was just playing around, but I think they turned out pretty well considering I basically knew nothing about photography at the time. And it’s nice to have the photos because I really miss her a lot.

When I was back in Dallas I found a Groupon for a 4 hour photography class by Beaux Arts Photography for only $50. I decided to give it a try.

The class was broken up into 4- 1 hour segments.

The Art of Photography – covered basics of photography as an art form and photo composition
Camera & Lighting Essentials – Aperture/Shutter Speed/ISO, JPG vs. RAW
Practice – We were given assignments and were sent out to take photos
Adobe Lightroom 101 – How to backup, store, organize and edit your photos

The class is designed for true beginners. The instructor, Sam, explaned things in very simple ways and made things that are a bit complex a lot easier to understand. He was very patient and was willing to answer every question. I thought he was a great teacher.

The most valuable part of the class, for me, was the last hour on Lightroom 4. This is a program that I was already using, but not well. Sam taught me several new tricks that I wasn’t aware of that have really improved my photo editing skills.

I decided to take what I learned and put it into practice by taking some family photos for my brother and his family. This was my very first portrait photo shoot and I am really happy with the results!