Deliberately mess it up.

If you came along to last nights meeting you would of been sat there bored, listening to me tell you how to edit your photographs, but wait a minute. I didn’t tell you how to do it. I showed you how I would edit three of my pictures and hopefully started you thinking what you could do to your own work to make it stand out a little.  I didn’t want any of you going away from last nights meeting thinking you had to do exactly what I said. I desperately wanted you NOT to do that and I really hope I succeeded.

I honestly think that everyone should take the pictures they want and edit them (or not) however they want to. They are after all your pictures. But I also think that if you do want to process your pictures you should try and make them the best they could be. If no one else likes what you’ve done to a picture, who cares! As long as your happy with it that’s what counts. But you have to admit it’s nice when someone tells you they like what you’ve created.

You may take something, look at it on the back of the camera and think “well that’s crap”, but I hope that the last two weeks have shown you that no matter how bad it looks on the camera screen it can be turned into a good picture with just a little bit of work. Now that’s not to say that you shouldn’t try and take the best photograph possible and get as much as possible right in camera, but if something goes wrong or you forget to change a setting because your in a hurry then its not the end of the world.

If I can create the picture on the right from the total mess on the left there’s no reason you can’t either! I guess what I’m trying to get you to understand is don’t be afraid to try doing something different when your editing your pictures. See what you can get out of the ones you think are beyond hope. You never know what you’ll get.

13 Weeks of Summer, Week 3

Well weeks 1 & 2 have gone and were up to week 3 of our 13 Weeks of Summer. This Thursday you can look forward to an evening of choices. Which Lens to choose, which focusing point to choose, which drink should you buy from the bar! ah well no not that one. It may seem like it’s only for those with dSLR’s but it’s not. If you use a point and shoot you need to make informed decisions. Do you walk closer to your subject or just zoom in. It does make a difference to your photograph, how? Well come along on Thursday and discover the ancient art of Zen and Lens Compression as told by Chairman Indiana Spiers.

The only other thing to say is WHERE IS YOUR HOMEWORK????? Forgot it again did you? Well if your not careful it’ll be detention for you. Please don’t forget to take a picture. We don’t care what it’s of. What size it is. Or any of the other usual things we ask you to do with it before you send it in. We’ll OK there is just one thing we want you to do and that’s put your name in the filename. Then just either Dropbox it, email it, or bring it in. We will need this picture for one of the coming weeks. So please take it and let us have it.

13 Weeks of Summer

We started our "13 Weeks of Summer" tuition course last week and I'm glad to say it went amazingly well. Everyone I spoke to thought it was well explained and easy to follow. Which is good because this week we're going to be carrying on with the Exposure Triangle and delving deeper into Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO. Don't worry though it's not going to get too heavy. The plan is to give a little talk on them with a few examples of how to combine all three to get the effect you want in your picture.Then for most of the evening we'll split into groups and you'll all be doing plenty of hands on practice.

So you can get the most out of this weeks session we'd love you to bring along your camera, it's instruction manual (if possible) and if you have one a Tripod. Even if you only have a small Gorillapod that's fine. I know not all of you will be able to bring tripods but we should be able to get by if we share the ones we do have.