Presque Isle State Park

When I signed up for this class, I thought we would go out and take pictures of places around Pittsburgh. After hearing all of the places we were going to go, I was really excited. Presque Isle State Park was one of the places I was most excited for. It was very cold, rainy and wet, but I tried to make the best of it. In the beginning, I had trouble figuring out the right exposure to work with because I haven’t taken that many photos of snow before. After a few tries I thought I had it fixed, but when I came back and looked at my photos, I realized that a lot of them were over exposed and tough to work with. There were also a few photos that had water drops on the lens. Oh well! It is what it is and you just have to learn work with what you have. The photos shown are the best ones out of the bunch. I really tried to concentrate on the snow mostly. I have never been to a beach with snow on top of the sand so I had a serious field day with it. Another concentration was the rocks. I have been to many beaches and have always wanted to take photos of waves crashing on them. A lot of my rock photos didn’t come out well, but I had a few that were still able to work. If I could go back in time, I would probably get more close up on the pebbles on the beach and maybe concentrate more on the waves.

I tried to represent every aspect of the beach in this photo. Starting with the sky, moving onto the water, the snow and then the dunes.

This is one of the first photos I took. This makes you think about what you could possibly be walking into when entering the beach.

This is one of my favorite rock photos. I like how you get to see the water breaking on all sides.

This represents the line of where the water hits, and where it stops. I feel like the snow and the sand represent two different worlds. The sand shows what you think a beach should look like and the snow  gives an idea what you think shouldn't be on a beach, but yet it still fits perfectly with the placement.

Point State Park

I tried to concentrate on the vanishing point with the benches and the poles.

This is one of my favorite photos, with the use of red with the rose and the brown dead leaves surrounding it makes the rose just pop out.

I tried to concentrate on the role of thirds with this photo. I think it also really captures an essence of Pittsburgh with the city in the back ground and the Pirates statue, which is the main focus.

The leading lines is represented with the bridge leading into the city. 

For our first assignment in our nature photography class, we took a walk through Point State Park to help us understand how to use our new compasses and get a feel of what our adventures would be like through out the semester. Being so busy with school and other activities, I haven’t had a chance in a long time to really walk through the city. Needless to say I was very excited when I heard about this assignment. When our class started, the weather wasn’t the greatest. It was very cold and cloudy, but I feel like that added to the photos shown to give them the best look they could of gotten that day. In the beginning, it was hard to figure out how to get started and how I wanted to go about taking my photos, but I figured I should start with what I know and work my way from there. For this particular assignment, I really tried to concentrate on the basics of photography to get a good start on my assignments. The main elements that I focused on were vanishing points, the rule of thirds and leading lines. Once I realized what my focus was, the photos just came naturally. Over the years, I have taken so many photos of Pittsburgh, but out of all of the photos I have ever taken, I was never really satisfied with any of them. I really tried my best to make these photos the way I viewed Pittsburgh in my mind. I do think that I accomplished it with these photos.