Hello from the lovely state of Colorado, faithful reader’s of Toni’s blog. I’m sitting here in my room, drinking hot tea, editing photos, and feeling tired and happy all of once because of my first day here at the Institute for Photographic Studies. I’m going to the week-long Prizewinning Photography course here, and day one has been awesome!
Today we heard different lectures on a variety of photography “stuff”–we covered the basics of cameras (which really aren’t so basic), lots and lots of elements of composition (read: FILL THE FRAME!), and this evening we touched a little on landscape photography. In addition to going to different sessions, we’ve already had 2 photoshoots today in Manitou Springs. But these weren’t just any photoshoots. These ones had rules:
Rule 1: No more than 25 images total during each shoot
Rule 2: TURN OFF REVIEW (completely, and totally)
Rule 3: No deleting photos
At the end we all came back, downloaded pictures, and had all of them critiqued. Scary, no? Well, I was scared at least. It was so much harder than I thought it would be, to say the least. Overall, I really didn’t like my pictures I got. Because of the time limitations and not being able to review what we had shot, it was a really stretching experience, resulting in some not so pretty pictures. But the idea was that as photographers we should think before we start shooting pictures–going through ahead of time in our mind what we want the picture to look like as opposed to just snapping off a bunch of bad pictures.
We also had 4 photo contests going through the day. We had three themes we were supposed to convey: Red, Excited, and Leading (as in leading lines, one of the elements of composition we covered). We also got to choose another photo of the day for another contest. So, for your viewing pleasure, here are some of my few good shots that I ended up liking…
We had tons of people running around town with awesome cameras–people kept asking us what we were doing 
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My photoshoot buddies for the day 
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NO REVIEW? wow… that would be hard… I guess I should try that. I like the shoe picture
and the one with all the people and their cameras.
Wow…I love the last three. That’s really cool. (Y’all should have bodyguards walking around with you…that’s like, an insane amount of money just in cameras.)
I love all of them! I think my favorite one is the first one of the flowers. Man, I guess it would be pretty scary to see a bunch of people crawling around town with equipment to “shoot” people with. ;D
Favorites: 1,2,4,6, and 7.
I love your use of angle, focus, color, and environment. You’ll be making big bucks soon enough.
-Ben
Neato! I like #1 and #4 the best!
Hope you had fun!!!!!!!! 
Hey,
I like the flower, the building and the one with the person who only has his/her feet in the photo.