Lights... Camera... Action! (At last! Action… Part 1)

OK, so enough rambling- time for some "action".

As this is supposed to be a record of me and my wife learning how to take good photos, I think the best way to fill the "action!" part of this introduction would be to show some pictures that we've taken.

I'm using the Flickr website to host all my pictures (rather than hosting them all myself), so if you click on the pictures, you can get to larger versions of them on the Flickr site. I like the way it makes photo sharing easy, and I've also found it to be great for inspiration- there are some great photographs and photographers on there, and it's well worth taking the time to have a browse around. Feel free to add any comments etc. on our photos there (or email me, if you prefer.)

Anyway, on with some pictures;

The first set is from before we got the digital SLR camera, and were just playing around with a point and shoot digital camera. These first two were from a wedding, where we made the useful discovery that apart from the "arty" look, black and white shots look far better in low light than colour pictures. Colour pictures look like a picture of whoever happens to be in the foreground, and the background kind of fades to nothingness. Black and white shots of the same room, from the same perspective look like shots of the whole crowd, because the people in the distance are just as clear as those in the foreground. (My only complaint so far about the Nikon D50 is that it doesn't have a black and white mode, so except for when I go back to carrying my old camera around, this is a wasted lesson!)

This is a sunset at the bay in Padstow. The lighting level has been brought down slightly to bring out the colours in the sky.

A shot of my wife (or rather, my girlfriend- this was before we were married.) I was trying to go for a more arty picture of her- while it looks as though she's staring out of the window, contemplating the world, she is actually studiously trying to ignore the fact that I was taking dozens of photographs of her. (Lessons learnt- if you take a hundred photographs and only one of them is any good, nobody needs to know about the ninety nine duff ones. Also, just because your model doesn't think they are posing, it doesn't mean that they aren't!) I was trying to get a Hooper kind of look, which I think worked quite well.

A less serious shot. More of an experiment in how still Barney would stay than an experiment in photography, but I like the result...

Incidentally, that one taught me that if you want to get lots of people looking at your pictures in Flickr, take pictures of cats and dogs- this was by far my most viewed picture, despite not appearing in any groups etc.- until I got married, and added this one of my wedding cake which at the time of posting is approaching 1,000 views. (It wasn't taken by me though, so I can't really take the credit. for the photo); s

I love lens flare effects- I love adding them in Photoshop, but these two were (deliberate!) natural lens flares. The big castle that overlooks Budapest, and the beach at Youghal in County Cork, Ireland.

(About a year after taking this photo, we got married in a church just up the road from this spot in Youghal.)

This one is actually about six or seven photos, taken with the same camera settings and stitched together (using a program called Autostitch) to create a panorama- a much larger version is available if you click on the image. There was a large fire in an oil refinery about 20 miles away the night before, and I was convinced (and still am, in fact) that the smoke was stopping the clouds from clearing. My dad was convinced that the weather had been exactly the same when he was out the day before. The picture was taken at about 3 in the afternoon in December, so you can judge for yourself whether it looks normal…

More playing around with photos- this time, using an effect called "fake tilt shift"- blurring some of the picture and over saturating the colours to create the impression that the picture has been taken in close up- as though it was a photo of a miniature model. I think it worked quite well.

Those are the best of my photos from before I got married. Not that getting married changes the way you look at the world (well, I suppose it does a little) but on our honeymoon, we bought ourselves a D50 digital SLR camera, and started taking photography a little more seriously, now that we had comtrol over things like depth of field, exposure times and so on.

The next selection will be of the photos we took on honeymoon in New Zealand- I don't think you can get a much better place to learn how to use an SLR.