Our Photography Courses Blog - Charlecote House, Warwickshire

What a fantastic day we had today…loads of fun and some amazing photo’s into the bargain!! Lynne is back again, and so is Jean! Steve made up the trio!
All three took some very unusual and considered shots, and found the exercise of going out into the landscape for half an hour without their camera’s to ‘feel’ the landscape an unusual but surprisingly interesting and incredibly useful exercise.

One of the reasons that photographs tend to not look the same as when you looked at the same scene by eye is that the camera has one eye and can’t judge depth.  As a result, it’s really important that dangling branches are kept separate from the background.  Both these shots (taken on photography courses at St Fagans and Charlecote) looked fine by eye, but the camera has flattened them so they don’t quite work.  Separating the foreground and background branches would have made a big improvement, but making the pictures easier to understand.

We had a great day at Charlecote (30th January)….the weather was beautiful. One of those wonderful, winter blue-sky days. Frost would have made it perfect!

Jon and Stephen were both extremely keen, and had a good working knowledge of their cameras, and fine-tuned by the end of the day. They were both very keen to ‘get it right in-camera’, which is a great mind-set to have!

We played around and practiced ‘shallow depth of field’, and really got to grips with it, as you can see from their stunning images!! They were both so pleased to master this effect, as it looks so professional , and transforms you immediately from being a ‘joe bloggs snapper’ and a ‘photographer’.

They were also keen to learn how to make water look ‘milky’ with a slow shutter speed. Also, another great lesson learnt, as always is: What is your intention?: Why are you taking that particular viewpoint?.

Jo came on the photography course at Charlecote wanting to learn to do two things – to blur the background and get silky water on waterfalls.

So:

Using a low f stop blurs the background

Or the foreground if you prefer

As far as the camera is concerned, both these shots are identical, just focused in different places.

Jo’s other wish was to do a waterfall shot, and Charlecote has a genuine Capability Brown waterfall.  We didn’t have a tripod, so used the camera’s timer with the camera perched on a stone.  Using a tiny aperture of f36 and the lowest sensitivity of 100 ISO gives the longest possible exposure – in this case 1/4 of a second:

Easy when you know how

A couple of Jo’s pics have also ended up in the Ask PMS section of the website, illustrating the effect of changing white balance in yellow evening light.  Why not have a look?