Weekly wrap up 4-8-16--Spring Break

We were on Spring break so pretty relax this past week. Our spring break is late as the coop we attend takes the week off when the Homeschooling expo is in town.  I will be attending today only, sitting in all the high school sessions!  As for school we did the bare minimum of school and went on a few more outings when the weather was nice.

I thought I would share something I have been learning the last couple of weeks.  The photography teacher at the kids coop has graciously agreed to help improve my photography skills during her lunch break.  Currently all my pictures are taken with my iPhone.  But we do own a great Nikon camera that is hardly ever used.  One day at lunch she was showing me a few pictures of what her photography students are doing in her class and I was literally blown away by the kids photographs.  They are amazing.  Right now she is teaching me about the Bokeh photography technique.  My husband and I went to the botanical gardens and spent several hours there practicing this technique.

So for those of you who are novices this technique is to blend the background away and here is an example of what I did with a piece of iron work on a fence

Here you can clearly see the background and it distracted from the image I was trying for 

so I tried again but was still not happy that I could see a faded line in the middle of my image

and this is the final picture that I am very happy with.  

I spent a lot of time just trying out different ISO, shutter speed, and aperture settings for each picture.  This allowed me to understand how the ISO, shutter speed and aperture all work together in getting that perfect photo.  I still have so much to learn but I do think I am getting a better feel for this technique:)

This is the final photo that I submitted to the photography teacher who  critique my photo  and gave me a new assignment

My next assignment was to work on photographing considering different perspective and having the picture tell a story.  So I came up with a few shots

I really liked this one but you can see my focus was off:(  Looks like two beardies but there is only one with his reflection

This was is good but does't tell a story really 

I like this one and it is titled--Lunch time!  

I haven't pick the final photo for this assignment still have the weekend to work on it:)

Not sure I will be switching to the Nikon camera permanently as it is quite heavy to lug around and honestly the apple iPhone is so convenient...but I like the creative side of photography:) so I want to learn how to use the camera properly:)

I also finished my newest stain glass piece that I have been working on for the last couple of months.

Now to get it hung in the living room window:)

My next stain glass project will be a water lily piece to hang in my master bathroom.  I haven't found the perfect pattern yet so I will be looking trying to find one that I like in the next few weeks so I can make it my summer project.

My husband and I managed to squeeze in a date night by meeting with friends and going to dinner at a great Italian restaurant and then attending a concert!

We saw the band play at the Peabody theater which is somewhere I hadn't been before and it was a beautiful facility built in the late 1930's

The band  was very goo, I did laugh when they announced they need to take a 20 minute intermission, the band like me is getting old :)

I took my son and his friend to the magic house one day for the last Homeschooling day of the year where they played and explored.  Then afterward I treated them both to a pizza lunch.  My daughter decided to enjoy a quiet day at home:)

I was going over the kids schedule over spring break and totaling days and hours (my state counts hours for attendance) and realized we only have about 30 hours left to record for the year!  Official school will be over by the end of April...although we continue to do school lightly over the summer months.