Today I want to give a shout-out to another of my favourite photography podcasts “Teabreak Tog”. It is run by Scottish photographer Julie Christie and is aimed mainly at beginners and intermediates. As a former teacher, Julie is great at imparting knowledge in a clear and simple way and she has a really easy-going style….
Interesting topic for last week’s Flickr theme was “Back Portrait” Described as “a matter of photographing people from behind and telling the other side of the story”. As you know, I was pretty busy last week and didn’t have as much time to devote to this as I would have liked, but some of the…
Posting way late this week as I’ve had a hectic few days again. Theme last week in the Flickr 52 Weeks Group was ‘Eye for Detail’ and so it was out with the Macro lens to see what I could come up with. I tried a few different ideas, mainly in the kitchen, but when…
Quick post this week as I’ve been super-busy with work and other stuff. Theme for the week was “Where I Live” Wasn’t sure what to post for this week, but our area is surrounded by British Army institutions – I live 3 miles from the world famous Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, a couple of miles…
This is the last in the series I’ve been running about analysing photographs. Over the past few weeks we’ve covered Exposure, Focus, Depth of Field, Colour, Contrast, Composition Rules and Composition aesthetics. Today I’m going to explain the steps I go through when viewing a picture. Back at the end of 2014 I was asked by…
A fun topic for the 52 Week theme this week – Shelfie. Yes, the ‘H’ is deliberate. People were asked to take photos of their shelves perhaps of books or other items. It was a simple idea but one that nearly caught me out as I forgot all about it. It was nearly midnight on…
This is the second part of my thoughts on Composition in photography. Last time we talked about guidelines that might help you, today we’re looking at more nebulous aspects of a photo; A good photograph will almost always tell a story and part of that narrative involves setting the mood and atmosphere of the picture;…
Another week has flown by. The theme for last week on Flickr was ‘Urban Wildlife’ which was always going to be something of a challenge for me as my windows of opportunity for photography are usually pretty small and wildlife photography usually requires time to find a location and wait for the wildlife to appear…
There’s a great article in Amateur Photographer this week which has kind of stolen my thunder with respect to composition, but for those that don’t read it I’ll talk today about some guidelines that exist for improving composition. Probably the most common compositional guideline is the Rule of thirds which I discussed in the post on…
The theme for last week was ‘Film’ and I decided to go with this shot of an empty cocktail bar as the pink colours reminded me of the film ‘Cocktail’. Taken with my phone and processed in SnapSeed; Apart from that, I had a good week with my 365 Project XLV and got some interesting…
Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at five of the six aspects that I believe define a photograph. I term them as being “technical” aspects as they are measurable or identifiable; Exposure, Focus, Depth of Field, Colour and Contrast. In these posts I’ve tried to explain a little about what each parameter is, why…
Theme for the week last week was “Look Up” which was a great choice with plenty of scope for interpretation. I was fortunate enough to bag my shot on Easter Saturday, right at the start of the new week so that was a welcome change. This was taken on my phone at the local shopping…
Contrast is defined in this article as; A tool that photographers use to direct viewers’ attention to their subject. There are two types: Tonal Contrast and Color Contrast. TC refers to the difference in tones from the lightest tone to the darkest tone, in other words, the difference in tones from white to grey to…
Lots to talk about today, firstly theme for last week was Childhood Memories and so I shot this as my entry, using my Kindle Fire as the shiny black surface the TV providing back-light (paused at a point where most of the screen was white) and one of my little LED lights as the key…