The discovery of over 1000 planets orbiting stars other than the Sun (i.e. exoplanets) in the past 20 years has revolutionized our theories of planetary system formation and evolution. Although a large number of planets are now known, only ~25 transit stars bright enough to enable detailed characterization of the planetary system. As part of my graduate research at the University of Louisville, I conducted five years of photometric observations from Moore observatory, located just outside Louisville, Kentucky, resulting in the high-precision characterization of known and newly discovered bright exoplanetary systems. I will discuss the instrumentation and methods used to optimize the precision of the collected data, and present a software package, AstroImageJ, that was developed to streamline and optimize the data reduction process. The results of two long-term transit timing variation (TTV) studies will be presented, along with the results of a measurement of sodium in the atmosphere of a well known exoplanet. Finally, I will describe the Kilo-degree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) transit survey, present an overview of the KELT discovered planets, and highlight the importance of these discoveries on exoplanet science.