Trip to Lake Katherine

I went to Lake Katherine in Palos Heights, IL yesterday for the first field shooting part of my photography class. It's a beautiful place. I'd like to get back there shortly when more leaves are changing color - maybe try a panoramic shot with Photoshop CS3's photo stitching abilities.

I got to experiment with shooting in shutter priority mode. I didn't have a tripod with me, but I did find an angle I could shoot a waterfall at that had a fence post that I could rest my camera on. There is definitely a difference in the silkiness of water movement, even between 1/4 second shutter speed and 1/25. (Not that I didn't believe all the photography books I've been reading - but it's a whole nother thing to see its effects with your own eyes). So I enjoyed toying around with that. I was looking for good animal shots and landscapes.

My "prized" animal shots are of an encounter I had with a squirrel. None are absolutely perfect, but they each gave me some things to think about next time I'm out shooting. I got one shot where the squirrel is trying to camouflage himself along the tree - but I got the tree in focus instead of the squirrel's eye. I knew it at the time but didn't want to move to change to manual focus point mode or manual focus, because I'm not quite familiar enough with that mode to change it without pulling the camera down from my eye - and I didn't want to miss the shot, so I took what I could.

I took about 250 shots and out of those, I've marked 34 "picks" from which I will try and choose my portfolio shots for class. I suppose how many I choose will depend how many picks I get out of next week's "urban" shoot. We need to choose 9 prints at 4x6 and one at 8x10 to turn in as our portfolio.

Here are the picks (click the picture below to view them on flickr):