Our Photography Courses Blog

Phil had a varied day teaching one to one photography at Ashton Court on Friday. Sometimes, personal photography tuition is a much more efficient way of learning, particularly for non-beginners.

Pedro had a lot of questions about white balance and using RAW files, with all the extra workflow and storage issues that come with it.  As always, we recommend using Picasa for basic work and Adobe Lightroom when you want more control.  For many beginners, Picasa (which is a free google download) is all they ever need, and it does not need to be connected on-line to Google in order to work.

White balance can be adjusted at will in post production with RAW files,  but for your personal morale you need to use a reasonably accurate white balance on the camera, or your strangely-coloured pictures will sap your creative energy!

Ian does this kind of thing well!

Ian is a highly experienced fashion/boudoir/glamour photographer, but rarely shoots outdoors, and wants to understand the lighting outside, where you don’t always have the control of a studio set up.  (ISO too low?  Just turn the lights up!)

He has some amazing looking work (much of it captured with our old favourite lens – the 50mm f1.8 (here acting as a 75mm f1.8). Glamour is not really our thing – but it’s good to see it done well!

We have a soft spot for Charlecote as photography venue. The fact that it’s so close to the M40 and and Birmingham, while being in the countryside and convenient for Stratford-upon-Avon doesn’t hurt!

These pictures are from Rachel’s DSLR course a few weeks ago – once again showing that you don’t need to take boring pictures even if you know that they have been taken lots of times before.

This river regularly floods and completely submerges the Capability Brown waterfall. There are a couple of waterfalls which make for great long and short exposure pictures.

They even have lambs!

We try to run all our different courses at Charlecote, as well as running some courses for the National Trust. It also benefits from a really nice cafe and extremely friendly staff. Have a look at the upcoming courses here.

We were asked to help some estate agents in Birmingham photograph their properties better. One of the tricks that we use is to use a little flash in alleyways and archways so that we don’t appear to be looking out of a dark cave.

This picture is from Charlecote house, and uses a little fill flash in the arch. Without that, the picture would be much less natural looking. So weirdly, a little unnatural flash makes the picture look more natural.

A little fill flash doesn't hurt!

We also worked on the use of fill flash to illuminate the room, while getting the view out of the window. A very useful technique to give more natural looking rooms.

We were undeterred at Shugborough even though we had to work most of the day with no power. this meant that Phil had to present the course from memory, but thankfully we had the power back in the afternoon and we could look at our pictures.

One of the things that we try to encourage people to do is to get low enough to the subject. This has two effects: firstly it  tends to fill the frame with the subject and make it look more important, so that the viewer knows what  they are supposed to look at. The second effect is to change the distance in the background so that the background is a different distance away and therefore out of focus.  This makes the shot a lot more effective:

It’s a dandelion, but is it the subject?

Same dandelion, but now it’s the subject.

It’s not something you have to do all the time  - but it is something that’s worth thinking about:

We know it’s the subject, but it’s boring

Not so boring now!