• Nikon D300
• Trip to Washington State
• 2019

There are three focuses to these photos. Purpose, experience, and learning.

1. Purpose
   • I took these photos back in 2019, when my husband (then boyfriend) and I took a trip to Washington state with some friends of ours. We were visiting from South Korea, and neither of us had been to this part of Washington.
2. Experience
   • My husband had gotten me a camera for my birthday. It was a Nikon D300. It was used and the images on the buttons had worn. Aside from not knowing how to use this type of camera I couldn’t read each button’s action. So, here was an opportunity for me to try and figure it out.
3. Learning
   • I wasn’t only teaching myself about learning how to use the camera, but I was also teaching myself about the art of photography.

It has been many years since I have revisited these photographs, and clearly there are problems. They capture beautiful images of nature and the colors are nice, but they wouldn’t win any prizes. I’d say being my own critic, that the two major issues are lighting and focus. If you were to zoom in on each of the photos you would see that they get blurry and pixilated this is because I wasn’t able to get a crisp focus, and that was probably because I didn’t know enough about light, but also I didn’t know how to use the camera ISO, speed or apeture setting.

Rule of Thirds

If I can’t get the lighting, I can work on the composition. Sometimes when you are an amateur photographer it is difficult to focus on what is the best part of your photo. This applies to writing as well. I loved the way the clouds billowed behind the wooded hill. The original photo was a broader landscape photograph, but it lacked focus. Where is a person supposed to look? I cropped the photograph with the rules of thirds putting the focus to the left of the photograph in hopes that a viewers eye would first look to the large cumulonimbus  cloud and then immediately the eye would go to the rocks that mirror the shapes of the clouds.

In this photo, I put Sara in the focus. The original shot was wider causing your eyes to fly all over the photo not really knowing where to stop. In this cropping your eyes first go to the woman and then pull back toward the white cloud in the distance. The photo is a little bit odd and uneasy. What is she looking at? Why isn’t she looking at the clouds behind her? Is she going somewhere?

Do you think I managed to draw the eye to the clouds or do you think I missed the mark?