Our Photography Courses Blog - Sheffield Park Gardens, East Sussex

We love Sheffield Park Gardens for our photography courses – the reflections and the way the Capability Brown lakes cascade into each other make it a great photography location that a lot of people, even National Trust members, have never heard of.

It has particularly tame ducks – this is the kind of portrait shot that we like – low angle to blur the background and emphasise the bird, lots of sparkle in the eyes, good colours, what’s not to like?

The reflections are particularly good – someone must have worked all this out!! Long shutter speed helps to keep the water flat here:

We also like to encourage interesting portrait style shots that describe the landscape – using a low f stop with a linear feature makes things look more dramatic:

Like our courses at Stourhead, the main problem with Sheffield Park Garden is trying to ensure you don’t take the views that Lancelot Brown marked out for us more than two hundred years ago! However, it’s those views that make these places such special places to visit.

A fantastically creative group and despite torrential rain they got fantastic results.  They were sent out with a specific job to do which really focuses the mind!  They all agreed they had got photos that they would be proud to hang on their walls:

Well, it started to rain, and it didn’t stop all day!! So yet another challenge for our intrepid creative photographer’s! Sometimes you just have to get on with it…..and we had some amazing images featuring the rain!

In reality, grey, overcast skies are preferable to bright, blue, sunny skies for photographers…..no nasty shadows, glary objects etc., but heavy rain is another matter!

Anyway, as you can see, they got some amazing photo’s, and just used the rain to their advantage…in others, you’d never even know that it was raining! Well done!

We had two large groups at Sheffield Park Gardens this time, and Rachel’s creative group had a great time in the Gardens, breaking some of the rules of photography (assuming there are any rules in the first place). It’s all about reflections at Sheffield Park: