First few weeks of school

So, I'm a few weeks into school now and I feel like I've learned a lot of helpful things already.

Photoshop:  I've started using Adobe Bridge for viewing and launching into Photoshop.  The Bridge is a great preview tool.  Also learned how to compile pictures into a pdf.  I've gotten a lot of helpful keyboard shortcuts and miscellaneous tricks that made me go "OHHH I wish I knew that when I was trying to do ____"!  Overall I'm getting used to the layout and expanded functionality since before I only had Photoshop's Elements version.  Our first big project is to get some digital photos and prepare them to look nice in a calendar.  I've chosen my 12 photos so I'm ready to go!

Intro to Graphic Arts: We just scratched the surface with Illustrator, which I had never used before.  I'm REALLY excited to learn more and play around with vectors.  We learned how to do a trace on an image to vectorize it.  Pretty fun.

Digital Painting: I'm playing around with my graphics tablet more.  So far we are just sketching and getting the feel for using the tablets.  Corel Painter has so many brushes and tools it's a little overwhelming.  I'll have to get the hang of it to learn which are my favorites and how to navigate the software quicker to get what I need out of it.

As far as Digital Photography class, I've learned a LOT but am quite disappointed that a lot of the things the teacher has been talking about I can not do with my camera.  However, it is really useful to know how everything works and how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO affect each other.  At least now I know what everything in the metadata means and how to interpret that to take a better shot next time.

Here is a fun picture I took this week of one of my dum-dums while playing with camera settings:

This photo is for my photography class, part of our first shooting assignment was to photograph "interesting shadows":