First Class

I signed up for a photography class through the Greene County Career Center to better learn all the settings an SLR camera is capable of and to get some supervised practice. The first class was very introductory and basic. I am the only male student in the class and at first impression seems I am the only techno-geek in the class. Not that I think I act too geeky, but with a physics and electrical engineering degrees I do understand a lot about the optics and even the electronics and sensor technology. I am going to research it to make sure, but I think I might even teach the instructor something about why higher ISO settings give larger files sizes. I suspect this is only true in JPEG and not RAW. And if so, other electronics/sensor people reading this will know where I am headed. I don't hold that against the instructor at all because the relationship between noise, or more correctly image entropy and file size is not relevant to being a good photographer. So as class progresses, I will make notes here about it.

The class has its separate blog and photobucket account and our homework is to take pictures. I took photographs on my drive into work this morning as I often do. Since this is a photography blog, I will share some. Finally I know, sorry. There will be many more to come, I promise.

These pictures are called, "Where's the Water?". This low-head dam on the Great Miami river has been around a long time. My grandfater fished here and has a story he loves to tell about how when he was a kid he caught a carp so big that he carried it home over his shoulder and it was dragging the ground. More recently as the bike-way travels along the side of the river, I can recall many family bike rides past this same location. Never do I remember seeing the dam without water passing over it. I make mental notes of things I see that I would like to photograph and saw the top of this dam sticking out of the water last weekend. I've been taking lots of nature photos lately, but I want to try and focus on photos that tell stories, have meaning or history attached to them. Here is my start. Enjoy.