Journalists at country newspapers are literally handed a notepad, pen and a camera and left to sink or swim. It’s a tough initiation into the world of photography, but you learn from your mistakes.
Without any formal training beyond some internal courses over the years, I recently signed on for a WEA adult learning course in SLR cameras. This was a course for beginners and some of the content wasn’t overly helpful to me, but the other sections were fantastic.
The course consisted of two days in the classroom and a night time and early morning outing. This is where we got to put our newly learned skills into practice.
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Some of the more interesting things the course took me through was exposure and white balance when dealing with white in an image.
An example of working with white balance. The clouds on the left without detail and on the right after white balance adjustment.
Another interesting skill involved adjusting exposure in low light and bringing out the shadow of the tree in this water. I also had to show the difference in an image when flipped. The composition of a photo can make or break an image.
Which do you prefer?
The original, with some pretty shadows on the water.
The flipped image.
While we were in the WEA classroom, my pink water bottle was a perfect photo subject. There are quite a few people (myself included) with half an SD card full of pink water bottle images!
My infamous water bottle in action.
Rach And Media 