What’s a surefire way to perk up your Monday?

Awaken your creativity and join a photography workshop! 🙂

I’m no professional but I sure, am, an enthusiast. Hey! With all cameras being handy nowadays, it’s just so hard not to get infected by the shutterbug. All hipsters can bat their eyelashes in 1… 2…  Kidding!

Anyway, the class itself was good. Not too intimidating for zero-experience in photography like me, but loaded with enough information that could really help you be more familiar with your gears — in my case, a borrowed Panasonic Lumix DMZ compact cam. They discussed about light, lenses, aperture, and shutters which kind of took me back to my old Physics-laden academic days. Except that it’s more fun and exciting now because there are no grades to maintain. 😉

Towards the end of the class, the trainers prodded us to participate in a small exercise. We were challenged to take a picture of anything inside the room. I got bored with all the building views so I decided to play around with my key chain toys.

Here are some of my manual shots. I used a little bit of Adobe Lightroom (Lr) for post-processing:

This one is my personal favorite:

And this one is my groupmates’ pick during the class presentation. The three groups in the class were asked to present one picture and explain something on the composition and manual tweaks applied. I just told them about my little Jack Skelington ‘obsession’ and my fascination with the afternoon sunlight and shadows. Seriously, the ‘magic hour’ is amazing.

It ended up as the trainers’ pick so I was quite proud with what I came up with. I just wish that one day, I will have a camera of my own and not rely too much on my iPhone. Don’t get me wrong. I have no qualms with my mobile cam but it sure would be helpful to practice what I’ve learned today with an actual manual camera.

Hmm.. maybe I’ll put that in my Christmas wish list. 🙂