Revisiting The Basics - My Sweet Shot Tuesday 14/06

I am lucky enough to be on a two day course run by award winning photographer Morag MacDonald of Documentary Image. In some ways it's quite a basic course but being mostly self taught I wanted a course that would try to break me out of any bad habits I'd got into and make sure I understood what I was doing and why.




The premise of the course is to teach you full control of the camera by the using it in fully manual mode. Today we were playing with one of my favourite photographic toys, depth of field.

I have uploaded my favourite images of the day to my Flickr stream but just wanted to show a couple here because I've really rather enjoyed taking these. They come to you "out of the camera" as we are encouraged to get the exposure right first time and save on the need for post processing.









We went to an old dock side area in Bristol which is still mostly undeveloped from the days when Bristol was a bustling port city so there is lots of old debris still around which makes for interesting images.





Kevin

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Trying To Lead Two Lives & A New Arrival

Another week has gone by and my posting rate seems to have collapsed.

Sometimes I think we try to lead two lives. The one we want to live and and the one we 'have to' live. Let's call that 'real life'. Over the last weeks once again real life has kept me under the cosh and my day job has taken me away from home and prevented me from keeping up my photography, my blog and my participation in the blogs of others.

So now I'm back home and once again I'm trying to squeeze the experiences of the photographer / bloggers life, the one where I meet new people and enjoy new experiences, the one I prefer to follow, into real life.

Before I went away I ordered a new lens and thankfully my return to home brought me face to face with my new purchase for the first time.

I had wanted to invest in a 50mm prime lens for some time since I started reading up on prime lenses and portrait photography.


Unfortunately new lenses are well out of my budget so I searched high and low for a second-hand lens but couldn't find an auto focus version anywhere. After much searching and consideration I located a manual lens which I took delivery of on Saturday.

After a false start and an embarrassingly frantic call to the supplier I realised I had to change a setting on my camera to accept a manual lens but after that I was up and running.

There was nothing else I could do but go out and practice.

Firstly I went out to an old stately home estate which had some great backdrops for some practice shots. I love the texture on the old walls and this shot of a trailing plant draped over it. I spent a good hour wandering through the grounds practising with the new lens only occasionally swapping out to my 18-55 when I needed a shorter lens to fit a wide view into.

My second outing was to Bristol Docks, a largely regenerated dockside area with some great modern features. It was a largely windy but mostly sunny day and presented some real opportunities to get some test shots.

I managed to get some, in my opinion, great shots and some which were somewhat out of focus, the reason for which I don't currently understand.

So my second life has managed to mostly emerge over the course of this weekend. I'm hoping that it will stay near the surface and will stay there in the coming weeks.

I do have an exciting photographic event coming up later this week. I hope to be able to bring more news of this soon.

Click here to check out the full 50mm set on Flickr and if you use Flickr yourself then why not link up with me while you're there.

In the meantime, have a great week.

Kevin
Follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/kevleighton