The thing about photography is

There's always more to learn. One of the last assignments we had of the semester was to create a narrative with six photos on one page. I struggled for awhile coming up with my concept, but eventually I was inspired by something my professor said in class about street photography and I decided that it was something I wanted to try my hand at. There are a lot of really great things about growing up LDS, but in some ways it hinders me as a photographer because I was always taught to respect people and rules. In street photography, you are often taking photographs of people without them knowing, sometimes in places where you shouldn't be. This is so far outside of my comfort zone, and I knew it would be a challenge, but I embraced it because I knew it would make me a stronger photographer. Working through a few ideas, I ended up taking photos at the mall. Another thing my professor said in class made me realize that it would be a great place to take photos because there is always something interesting going on (and my grandmother, who is an avid people-watcher, would be proud). I ran into some technical problems right away, first off that it wasn't very light at the mall. I know it seems like it would be really light, but I needed a larger depth of field and a fast shutter speed, which all decreases the light I'm allowing into the lens, so it was pretty dark. I upped my ISO as high as I could without getting too crazy on noise, but I still ended up with a great deal of noise in my photographs. My second obstacle is that this was the first time I would be trying to compose a photograph without looking through the lens. I held the camera down in my hands so that people wouldn't realize I was taking photos of them, but that made it infinitely more difficult to come up with a nice photograph. I joked around that my percentage of decent shots was reversed, only about 10% of what I shot was even worth looking at (although towards the end of shooting, I was improving that percentage). The next issue was focus. When you're not looking through the camera, you can't decide what to focus on (and the auto-focus is either too slow or doesn't focus on what you want to be useful), so I had to pre-focus and then try to get my subjects into the space in front of me that I had focused for. Finally, I had difficulties editing because of the previous problems, so my photos weren't anywhere near as sharp as I normally have, and there was too much noise for me to edit out completely. In the end, however, I was extremely pleased with what I turned in for class.

This project pushed me in so many ways, and it is definitely a style of photography that I want to be more proficient at (maybe I'll choose an outdoor location next time though so I can have more light). Overall, though, I think I'm a better photographer for having attempted and succeeded at a new type of photography.