Tammy Judd Jenny
Digital Photography Class – Project Two

This Place I Call Home

For this assignment we were to take pictures of “the place we call home.”

Home for me is Petersburg, Alaska. After a few weeks of taking photographs around my town and surrounding areas I wound up with about 450 photos. It was kind of tough narrowing them down to just four for the class assignment!

I have also been having some challenges with my camera. It is pretty old and over time had gathered dust inside. So, I’d take a nice photo but these bits of dust would show up on the photograph. After asking around about how to get the camera cleaned, I was able to find a lens cleaning kit at the local drugstore and managed a DIY (do it yourself) cleaning. I was pretty nervous I’d mess something up but it did help and the camera still works so I guess I didn’t break anything. I think I will be able to continue to use my camera.

Driftwood Stump

Driftwood stump
In the picture of the driftwood stump, I had been down on the beach trying a 70-300 mm lens that I thought may not be working right. My camera was still in landscape mode while I snapped the picture of the stump. I was attempting to capture the interesting different textures of the stump and rocks surrounding it. I think I’d zoomed into the stump which caused the background focus to soften quite a bit. I liked the effect since the stump was my subject matter here. I framed the stump slightly off center while it leaned into the picture. I don’t recall if I’d switched this lens to a macro setting for this photo but I may have done so while experimenting with different settings. Many of the photos I took with that lens would not completely focus and I still believe there may be something wrong with it. The zoom function doesn’t work right anymore. I do quite like how this image came out.

Boat ribs

Boat ribs
This was the second time I’d taken this picture. I had been down to the fisherman’s memorial the day before and snapped a similar photo, but was unhappy with the focus, which was too soft. I came back the next day, after cleaning my lens, to try it again. I decided to use the landscape setting on my camera because I wanted to focus on the ribs of the boat but also thought that setting would give enough depth of field to also keep the rosemaling, painted on the shutter of the building, in focus. The boat is a Viking ship sitting outside the historical Sons of Norway Hall. For those who do not know, Petersburg has a heavily Norwegian heritage so these rosemaling touches are all over the place. It seemed appropriate to include a taste of those with this image and with this assignment about place.

Viking Ship

Viking ship
At sunset the day before taking the boat ribs photo I took this image looking up the mast of the Viking ship. I was underneath the edge of the boat pointing the camera up the pole. I switched the camera to automatic but used a manual focus. I didn’t adjust the ISO although it was getting dark by then but I wanted the shapes to silhouette against the little bit of light left in the sky. I framed the image so that the creature on the bow could be seen, the shields along the edge, as well as the figure, which appears to be on the boat. The figure is actually that of a statue located on the other side of the boat. Because of the angle and location where I stood the figure appeared to be standing in the boat itself. I’ve always been fascinated with silhouettes in artwork. I especially like how graphic this picture looks.

Sunset

Sunset
In the sunset photo, I used manual focus but do not recall if I had the camera set on its sunset setting or if I was using the aperture priority setting.  I have been experimenting with both of these settings and the different lighting settings, so I’m still on a learning curve. Previously I used my auto setting almost exclusively and only occasionally used manual focus.  I have been experimenting and still learning the other special settings on my camera. I see on this images’ camera data that the exposure was 1/250 sec, f/13 and my ISO was set at 100 which is standard on my camera but it’s not clear which setting I’d otherwise used.  In Petersburg last week we had a rare happening of having several sunny days in a row. I was out in it every day after work taking pictures. In this image I tried to capture the pretty colors of the setting sun reflecting in the water. I enjoy the texture of the reflections of silhouettes in the water and the little sunburst I captured just before the sun went down.