Creative Camera Techniques, also known as It Hurts My Brain

We (myself and fellow photo enthusiasts, Amber and Rachele) spent three hours in class today looking at really cool professional photographs and then listening while our teacher told us his trade secrets, these included star trails (long exposure for overnight shots done while camping in darkness) and sun stars (achieved by shooting directly into the sun with the aperture clamped down - using a higher aperture like F/16.0), moving with a moving object to create unique blur, image overlay (with Nikons you can do this with your camera settings, for Canon you have to use Photoshop, PSE or similar), playing with perspective (including setting your camera down in the middle of the street and taking a shot), reversed images, when to use black and white (the four elements he mentioned when considering shooting in black and white include texture, pattern, relationships, and light), and how you can flip your lens to make it a macro lens. Yeah, you read that last one right. Flip the lens, being careful to hold it in place, and then fire away. When doing that, you focus the camera by moving it toward the item you're shooting. Note, if your lens actually touches the item, you've gone too far. You can still use shutter speed and your ISO setting to help bring in light since your aperture is not an option. In a nutshell, it was about taking what you'd normally do to capture a shot and figuring out some way to tweak it to get something unexpected. I took nearly 300 photos during our 2 hours outside practicing, then I narrowed that down to 37 and tried to use the new workflow I set up for processing my photos in Photoshop Elements, but that took so long I wanted to ram a fork in my carotid artery while simultaneously swallowing my camera battery so if the bleed out from the neck injury didn't finish me off, the battery leaking into my system surely would. In other words, a long, slow, painful death actually seemed like a better idea than finishing my work in PSE. And the teacher of that class called iPhoto el diablo. HA. The pics that I did finish editing can be viewed here, the rest are going to remain unedited and will never, ever be seen by the people of this world. Ever.