Photography Class 101

Last month I started taking a photography class. It is 3 six hour classes. We bought a SLR camera at the end of last year, so I thought it would be helpful to have some idea of how to use it and to be able to take better pictures with it. I have taken two of the classes so far and I have learned so much, but there is still so much to learn. We were given homework after our 1st class. We were to take different pictures that helped us to get familiar with shutter speeds and aperture and to look at things around us that showed different shapes. The teacher looked at our 6 best pictures and gave us some feedback during the 2nd class. I didn't blow him away with my pictures, but I don't think they were horrible either. Here are a my favorite three.

He told me to try this one of Sadie again and see if I could focus in on all of her face (her nose is out of focus in this one). I liked the idea that her nose is circles.

The only thing he said about this picture was that I needed to crop out the dirt parts of it. More circles in the flowers.
This one he also said I need to crop out the top and bottom parts of it, but other wise the technique and such was good. Here I was trying to capture the triangles and rectangles.

I am on my way to being a professional photographer.....we'll not really, but I hope to be able to capture better pictures using manual instead of the safe zone of automatic.