About 18 months ago I was given a very fancy pants camera for my birthday. I had been going on about wanting to take up photography more seriously for about 100 years, but could never bring myself to part with the serious money required to up my game and get some decent kit. So Rory called my bluff and delivered the real thing all wrapped up with a ribbon saying ‘you better bloody well get on with it now’.
The Beast really is a thing of beauty. A zoomy lens, a swish case, things that clip on and off, and a whole host of buttons and functions that made me feel really rather stupid. I poured over the manual, trying to take in all the instructions, and deduced that it may as well be in Japanese. There was a video or three that followed a very beautiful woman taking pictures of her family, showcasing the various functions, and her perfect hair. Life was too short to trawl YouTube, so I flicked the function to AUTO and took it out for a spin and took pretty great pictures. Plus, with a bit of TLC in the form of cropping and filters, pretty awesome pictures. Job done.
And that was 18 months ago, But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow…. cheating? Or perhaps not cheating, exactly, but I certainly had no idea what was going on in my camera. I was relying on continuous shooing and dumb luck. The truth is, I was intimated by the tech and by the people who seemed to understand the tech. Chat of ISOs and Aperture and Shutter Speed made my head spin. I messed around with white balance once and almost had to take my camera back to the shop because I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I call that my ‘Blue’ period. Stella pulls it off rather well.
Having a snazzy camera comes with a certain presumption that you know what you’re doing, so I just kept schtum and hoped no one noticed my scarlet letter ‘A’ for Auto when peering over my shoulder.
For 18 months, ‘A’ was was OK, I was mainly using my camera on holiday and at events. I had got to grips with composition a bit and figured out a little more about interesting angles. I stopped cutting people’s feet off in the frame, and started messing about with more abstract ideas rather than straight up ‘Pics of my Holiday’ shots. And this is where I started getting frustrated. ‘A’ wasn’t getting me the effects I wanted. I saw vivid contrast, and got bland uniformity, I wanted to evoke speed, I got perfect stillness. It was time to bite the bullet and learn how to use The Beast (aka Canon EOS 600D). But where to start? There are literally 100’s of courses out there.
Lucky for me I happen to spend my weeks running around London with a bunch of very creative people, and there I had met Matilda, who mentioned she was running Beginner’s Photography workshops and I should check them out.
So I did. It was awesome.
We met on the South Bank on a very cold Saturday morning, and spent the next 4 hours learning about our cameras, deciphering all the tech and lingo, and then getting to grips shooting live models (the gorgeous Tilly herself, as well as a few bemused cyclists)
I got to ask all my stupid questions, muck about with all the settings and started to understand why some shots worked and others didn’t. We’re incredibly lucky living in London as there are so many amazing opportunities to get creative, and Tilly gave us a few genius pointers to start thinking about photography differently.
Here are a few of my practise shots.
Most importantly I walked away confident enough to leave my days of auto function behind me, and curious enough to try another workshop (or 5) with the big kids.
Any other snap happy bloggers out there with a few pointers to share?
Blink And You'll Miss it 