Merry Christmas 2010

I don't usually decorate my house a lot during Christmas, however I do enjoy when I see a beautiful Christmas tree, as you can imagine, I enjoy taking pictures of it.

We had our Christmas dinner yesterday at my brother in law's house and their Christmas tree was gorgeous so I took a lot of pictures of it and I want to share them with you here.

The tree:



The presents:



The decoration:









I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and hope you have a wonderful new year!

Photography class: Assignment 1 - Playing with light

As I mentioned before, I am taking a digital photography class and I want to share with you all the homework I have to do.

My first homework was to play with light when taking a picture, to be more specific I had to:

• Select an object, any object.
• Use a lamp to provide the light.
• Put the object and the camera in a fixed position.
• Use the automatic setting of the camera without using the camera flash.
• Take pictures of the object lighting it with the lamp from all possible angles.

I took a lot of pictures of several different objects, I couldn't find the right one until I tried with a small wood sculpture of an old man, it was perfect because it is very expressive.

Here it is the first set of pictures I took:

This assignment was very interesting, I was able to see how the light affects the object and how you can create look different photos of the exact same object, making some of them better than the others just by position the light in the right place.

The light can make the same object look very different, sometimes it looks like if the object was moved, you can control how much of your background would be displayed, all of this affecting the composition of your photo, so you definitely want to play with light.

At the end I did another round putting getting a bit closer to the old man and moving him a little bit:

As you can see, the light can affect how the dimensions of your object are displayed, depending on the position of the light the object can look flat, but by moving the light you can show the tridimensionality of the object by playing with the shadows.

Your photos can become more expressive when positioning the light in the right place, play with it, experience it yourself. If you do, please share your results with us!

It is never too late!!

Back in 2004 and 2005 I was living in Madrid Spain for a few months, I had the chance to go to several different cities in Europe, which allowed me take a lot of pictures of a lot of beautiful places. I wasn't always happy with the pictures I took so back then I thought "when I am back in Costa Rica I'll take a photography class", it was one of those things that I really wanted to do.

Some of the cities I visited were Rome, Florence and Venice, I fell in love with Italy, so back then I also thought "I want to learn Italian, I'll take a course when I am back in Costa Rica", well we are now in 2010 (five years later that you might think is a lot of time) and I can now say that I am learning Italian and taking my photography class, finally!.

I started the Italian course in January and the photography class this month, even though it took me five years to actually start taking these classes I am very excited that I am finally doing it.

So you might be wondering what's up with this story, well my dream is to be able to go to Italy with my husband for a few weeks to practice my Italian and to take great pictures of the awesome cities Italy has. If that is not possible, well I still want to take great pictures of anywhere and anything and to speak Italian fluently with whomever speaks Italian to me :) At the end, what I am trying to say is that it is never too late and you are never too old to do the things you want to do, just make the decision and do them, you won't regret it!

On another topic, I would like to share with you my experience in the photography class, so I am going to document all the different homework that I have to do for my photography class here in my blog, pretty much explaining what the assignment was, what I came up with and what I learned from it, because who knows it might be helpful information for somebody else, so wait for my first assignment.

Here it is a picture of Venice I took in 2005, it has some HDR post-processing: