Playing around with Exposure...

Tonight after losing badly at Connect Four, I decided to walk around the house looking for anything that would give me an excuse to take a photo or aggravate my son, whichever came first.  I'm working on getting ready for a New Years challenge.  The challenge is 365 days of photos.  Welllll....I can't say I'm going to commit to 365 days, but I'm going to do my best to pic up my camera as much as possible this coming year with the goal of learning as much as possible with every shot, whether it be accidental or focused. 

I finally settled on aggravating my son, since he beat me so badly.   Slouched out on the couch,  a rip in his jeans caught my attention.  Abstract and the unexpected has been my goal the past couple of days.  So I took  this.....

well, that was boring!! 

So I decided to try to get creative by taking my exposure from the lamp behind him and turning off the flash.  I knew I'd get a much darker image with this method, just didn't now how dark.  With my camera set to manual, and my apeture set to 1.8, and my white balance on cloudy (giving me warmer tones)  I took an exposure reading from the 75watt lamp.  I then refocused my shot on the ripped jeans and I got a much darker image. With a little enhancement work in Photoshop Elements to lighting and contrast, I finally got the abstract shot I was looking for.  Much more interesting, don't you think? 

Lesson Learned: 
A photography friend said to me a couple of months ago, "once you learn how to work with exposure you can really begin to get creative."  I had no idea what he meant at that time, but I immediately went out and purchased Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson...remember anal me??  With Bryan's easy to read book and my friends advice....It all makes sense now!!  Exposure and getting comfortable with my Manual settings is King to getting creative and I'm just getting started!!

Unveiling creatively,
Dee