Catch lights in their eyes

My on-line photography course with Karen Russell finishes tomorrow night at 5pm (middnight her time) and we (all the students) are very sad it's over. We are all staying on board with the forum, posting pictures of the day and everything that we have been through is still there with the exception of Karen. Most of her past students stay together as a group on-line which is great. It's been fantastic and Karen was an amazing host/teacher and very accessible and down to earth. The course was everything I expected and more. She isn't teaching a class this fall (that's US talk) as she is going to Greece with Ali Edwards (scrapbooker) and another lady called Jenny Bowland to teach so I look forward to seeing her amazing photos soon on her blog.

I wasn't new to photography when I started the course as I had bought my very first Canon AE1 film SLR when I was 17 years old. I bought it from Ted's Camera Store in the city and it cost me $380 which one about a months pay for me in those days and I was working full time. This was the camera + the twin lens kit lenses. Wages have come a long way since then, but my friend and I were so excited to get cameras and learn how to use them so we enrolled in a photography course at West End and also learnt how to process B&W photos (that's also what you did back then in the dim dark ages....)

I knew that camera inside out and had put hundreds of rolls of film through it until I was over at Southbank at a cafe with a friend of mine who was visting from Perth and the camera dropped onto the ground from the seat and it broke the shutter mechanism and it never worked again. I was devastated and couldn't even bear to throw it away for years.

Fast forward to the digital revolution and I bought my first Digital SLR when James was 8 months old and basically shot in AUTO most of the time. A few years ago I started scrapbooking and reading blogs because of scrapbooking and the whole photography thing was revived for me. I wanted to take better photos and here we are today. So back to why I started this post in the first place and that was to show you the "catch lights" in James and Sienna's eyes in the photos I took of them yesterday. Lighting was a key thing for me to learn and master how to better use it and I'm thrilled with these pictures. I'm hoping to keep improving on this subject because with the right lighting you can do wonders.