Gosh, where have I been?

Well, I've been busy and found I was not easily able to add photos and participate on a daily basis here : (  
I let myself off the hook and simply took a little break instead. I wanted to back blip the photos I have continued to take all week, but found that to be too overwhelming right now. I settled for getting today's photo up - you gotta do what you can do! I may add those later, but right now I am adding this one!

This hibiscus is from the shooting we did at the Advanced Digital Photography class  I am taking. The more advanced people are going over some of the things we are learning (not a bad idea they tell me) and I am just now discovering how to manually set my ISO, my shutter speed and the aperture on my camera and learning how they all relate. This is a brave new world for me. My brain is working hard on trying to comprehend it all. My photos do show the difference though when manually directing how my camera sees -I can see the difference. I hope to share some other examples from last week's practicing on my own.

For this photo my instructor James Johnson (who is very good) chose this flower because of the natural light and told us to set the aperture at f 4.0. Then we set the rest and made variations to see what happened. This one I set at 800 shutter speed and 640 ISO and I think it came out the best. He was hoping we would get some photos that highlighted the flower while the background faded to black.

Oh! He also taught me how to begin to read a Histogram!!! So, I have been a busy bee with this learning, a house guest for a week, a dance performance I went to, a movie with Steven, a doctor visit (all good), more planting in the front, boat rides, friends for dinner, an art studio tour . . .  time seems to fly but I am enjoying it all and did not want to stretch myself too thin. I will be back to visit your journals soon - sorry for my absence!!!

Just living is not enough, said the butterfly.
One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
 -Hans Christian Andersen