12 weeks to better photos

I recently started the 12 weeks to Better Photos online course. So far its been going swimmingly. I've done the first 3 weeks, and will be working on week four (Flash) once we get a little better weather. I decided to go ahead and post the first 3 weeks here, so that way I have a record of them.

The first week was aperture. We were to take a photo in the same place with different aperture settings. These are what I got:

f/3.5

f/8

f/14

f/22

If you look you can see that the background is really blurry in the first one, and gradually gets sharper and more in focus. Awesome, eh.

The second lesson was all about shutter speed. We were to take a few shots of the water trickling over an object in our sink. I had quite a bit of trouble with this one as apparently my house is a dungeon and no light was enough to really get a good shot of water running over an object in the kitchen sink. Who knew? Here's what I got with that lesson though.

  

1/80

1/200

You can barely see a difference in the water on the bowl. Unfortunately the higher shutter speeds were just way too dark to even see. Shutter Fail. Or Mommy Fail, whatev.

The third lesson was about white balance. We were to take photos of a certain subject and use the auto white balance, the Tungsten balance, and then do our own custom white balance. Honestly, I think I prefer the auto white balance. Apparently I super suck at custom. It looks too yellow to me. What do you think?

Auto

Tungsten...um ew.

Custom. Meh

Has anyone else done this course? Tell me about it in the comments!