Deer Valley Retreat with Nicole Hill Gerulat

So here are my other shots from Nicole's Classes Retreat. Nicole writes about it on her blog here. I had such a great time and learned a lot. Here's a bit of what we did.

This was what was waiting for me in my room

This was the beautiful view out my window

And this was the condo we stayed in. In my condo Pam and Nancy who were friends from California shared a room upstairs and I had my own room. Downstairs, Kathryn from Highland had a room. It was totally fun getting to know these ladies

It was a beautiful condo

The first thing we did was learn how to use our camera's in manual and then we went outside to practice. Nicole was an excellent teacher!

Allie was our first model and she was darling. She was Nicole's gorgeous, little sister

That night we had a girl's movie night

The next morning we did our abstract assignment on Main Street in Deer Valley

I took some architectural shots as well

Mallory, Nicole's assistant has a great taste in fashion. I would have liked to get her red scarf in the picture also but I wasn't tall enough

Then we took the tram up the mountain

It was gorgeous

We learned to take soft water pictures and more about shooting with the light

We learned how to take pictures while bringing the zoom lens in (or out)

I had lots of fun with that

Kate and I explored an old mine up on top of the mountain and then went back down to lunch

We learned some panning too though I forgot to take those kind of shots on the way down

That night we did portraiture shooting with another one of Nicole's beautiful sisters

In the Photoshop part of it, I learned that I tend to go too blue. This is a good example of that. I need to warm it up

Much better!

I had flip flops on and so I didn't last very long in the snow

I liked the reflections in the windows here

On the last morning we had Brooklyn for our model and we did shooting with reflectors. It made a huge difference!

In the afternoon of the last day we did some tabletop and I learned a lot there which I am excited to try out! And we went over work flow which included Camera Raw and a little Photoshop

Here are only some of the things that helped me the most- 

1- I was already shooting in manual but I learned to use my "in camera" White Balance. I could never figure out why I couldn't get those outside creamy white skin tones that I like so much. I was trying to get it afterwards in Light-room, but it never worked quite right.

2- I couldn't figure out why my shots don't look quite as sharp as they should. One problem was that I often shoot with a shutter speed below 1/125. If your subject is very still and so are you it might work but not likely. And the other thing is that my blog photos should be PNG files. I haven't done that here but I will start experimenting with that.

3- I shouldn't take my ISO passed 400 unless I absolutely have too. I have been too liberal there since my ISO goes up to 6400

4- Use wrapping paper for tabletop photo's. It's cheap and easy to work with

5- Use cheap white foam boards or white pillows for reflectors

6- Use the in-camera grid to line up your photos

7- I learned about some great websites like pinterest.com

8- And the most expensive thing I learned was that I want an I Mac!