SUBJECT MATTER - Mel Roschal

For this assignment, I was excited and overwhelmed at the technical aspect of what was required. I have a much better understanding of the camera, F stops, and shutter speed. For my subjects I chose several different ones.

For the motion part of the assignment, I first chose water fountains. The first fountain didn't work out so well as a "motion" capture. The actual "motion" of the water on the rocks of the fountains didn't really look like motion, so it turned out to be a depth of field picture. Plus I got kicked off of the property where I was taking the pictures - my church. The second fountain I found had three huge spouts of water coming up and the sun was in the right position, so this time I got permission and fired away. This turned out to be my best shot of all. I captured the movement of the water, the lighting was perfect and I think I did a pretty good job at keeping the "thirds" rule in mind. The next motion picture I was able to capture, came out really well too. It's a shot of my son, Spencer, practicing soccer in the front yard. You can't really see him because he's in motion so he's just a blur, but it's a very cool shot.

For the depth of field part of the assigment, I started with my car. Sounds a little lame, but I LOVE my car, plus it has my name in chrome on the back so that's the shot I took. The other part that interested me is that the car is black and it's ALWAYS washed to a high glossy shine, so I wondered what the reflection of trees and the sky would look like in the final print. The next scene was a statue of Mark Twain, in front of Spencer's school. It's a bronze statue and it makes me laugh all the time. I'm not even sure you can call it a statue. It's Mark Twain sitting on a park bench reading a book. When I was leaving the school one day to go take my second scene shots, I glanced over at the statue and couldn't resist. The sun was behind me, Mark Twain looks great that day, and the curvature of the building behind him seemed pretty interesting. Finally the last shot was again at Mark Twain Elementary. There's a really cool marquee sign in front of the school and the shadows of the trees around were almost point towards the sign. I decided I would try this shot and figure out the whole being in the canopy, taking your reading outside the canopy, and all that jazz. It was a good learning experience, but didn't come out as a great shot.