हाउ इट्स दोने.

So here we go, my first post on my new blog.

The idea here is to post about my photography (obviously) but also to give a little insight into how some of my photographs are taken instead of simply just showing off my work, in the hope that maybe some of you out there will perhaps learn from my mistakes and/or get ideas into furthering their photography.

So image number one, and I have chosen this picture to start because for me, it typifies what I love about photography. This was taken on the way home from a day at work, I am a firm believer in taking my camera everywhere possible even if it means leaving it in the boot of the car or packing a small backpack with a body, a choice of lenses and perhaps a speedlight say, but one thing I never leave home without is my Manfrotto (Bogen) 'Super Clamp' with a ball head mounted on it, its lightweight and so easy to fit into my small back pack (which by the way is a Lowepro 'Slingshot 100AW' for those who are interested) the only downside to this however is there has to be something to clamp to, but I haven't yet been stuck without and lamp-post, railing or wall to use (touch wood!!)

As I was driving home I knew I to had to pull over and get a shot of the wonderful sunset that was unfolding, so I drove up the road until I saw the angle I wanted.

Now, I knew from experience that a shot in this low light would either require high ISO setting (which is always a last resort as far as I'm concerned because of the loss in image quality due to 'noise') OR use a steady surface. In this case my choice of stability for the SUPERclamp was a good old fashioned park bench. Because of the versatility of the ball head I was able to compensate for the dodgy angle it provided me and keep the camera level with the horizon which is kind of a golden rule in landscape photography. So, using the composition grid over-laid on to the the view finder image (very useful by the way), I levelled up the shot.

Now I always try to take second to think about how I want my picture to look, in this case I wanted that dreamy look on the sea which is achieved by leaving the shutter open for extended periods of time, which was not a problem in this circumstance because my camera was all clamped up and wasn't going anywhere. I needed a long lens to get me over the wall which was about 3ft in-front of me so I used my Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5 and set the ISO to its lowest setting to make sure I got the best quality, set the camera to 'Aperture Priority' or 'A' mode, set the aperture to f/11 (I always try to use f/8 or f/11 where possible as they are generally speaking the best for quality and saturation ect). Why f/11? well I wanted the shutter open for a longer period of time so f/11 was the obvious choice over f/8 which would have meant the camera would have selected a slower shutter speed because of the extra light that it would have allowed in to the sensor. To minimise vibration I used the 'Exposure Delay Mode' which flips the mirror up then fires the shutter eliminating any movement caused by the mirror. Then I pulled the trigger.

I took several shots from different angles, each time making sure I checked the results on screen, zooming in to check focus (which was manual and set to infinity and beyond). I knew I didn't have to worry about white balance because I was shooing RAW so I would tweak that later in Photoshop anyway, but I think I set it to Open Sun just to give me an idea. I also experimented with metering, which determines where the camera reads the light from i.e. the centre of the frame or an average of the entire frame. In the end I settled for the latter - 'Matrix'.

Once I had a few shots (and by this time the sun was gone anyway so it was time up) I packed up and continued on my way home for dinner.

Later that evening, I put my memory card into my laptop and opened up the photos. I quickly browsed through and deleted the ones I didn't like, short listed the ones I thought would work best and one-by-one I opened them in photoshop, again just really only tweaking the white balance and blacks a little. I do make a big effort to try and get the picture right at the time I'm taking it, as my post processing is not yet as great as it could be and it saves work in the long run, so once I've edited all the chosen pics and added my logo, I re-save them as high quality jpg files and there you have it, my creativity for the day is done.






If you have any questions please post them or e-mail me andypotter3@hotmail.com.