Tonight we are entertained by Billericay based Photographer Daniel Bridge.
A bit of history. He looks impossibly young to have started out in 2003, but he claims to have been doing lectures, tutorials and training sessions since then and judging by tonight’s show, doing it very well.
Chatting to him at the end of the show, he said all his spare time at the moment is being taken up by the stand he has at the Photographic & Video show at the Excel Centre in March … give him a wave if you see him … rather him than me!
What Daniel gave us tonight was hope.
He showed that you don’t need vast amounts of money to get these cracking nature shots. With just a basic lens (with a caveat that, when you are adding extension tubes and/or extenders, you’re also expanded any shortfall in your lens) he showed us fabulous images taken with wide angle, standard zooms, telephotos & bridge cameras. Basically saying the only restriction is your confidence.
He had mushrooms taken with a 24 mil lens and a 400 mil lens,
dragonflies with the same 400 or a 35 mil macro lens.
With a little confidence U2 can be taking these shots.
So far he spoke about close focus. He explained the difference between between close focus and macro. How macro meant life-size, so if you took a photo of a 20p piece the image on your sensor would be 22 mm wide at full frame. That only leaves six mil each side and one mil top and bottom of the image on said sensor.
Then he showed us various ways of getting macro for not so many bucks … extension tubes is a cheap way forward. Getting a reversing ring, basically a bit of kit with your camera lens mount and a screw thread on the other side that you screw your camera lens filter thread on to. Get one about the same size as your throat on your camera (about five quid on eBay) & a set of step up or step down rings to fit any of your lenses onto your camera. Ideally, you want a lens that you can control the aperture manually, so have a word with Chris and see what Farleigh has in stock. Strangely the wider the lens, the bigger the image, so a 28 mil gives a bigger image than a 50 mil.
Next he suggested putting a big zoom on and reversing another lens in front of it to act as a magnifying glass. The next step would be to fit extension tubes and finally a converter. He had a photo that showed his set up for a throwaway shot of a penny piece with a magnification of 45 times life-size not very practical, but fun to execute,
just to say … I’ve done that.
Next he took us to flash, the pros and cons of ringflash. He didn’t like ringflash but had some shots to show what you can do with it. Again the advocation of make do, secondhand flash units. Naturally warning of trigger voltages of some of the old units. Over at Canon they only recommend 10 V trigger voltage and some of the old stuff fires at 200 V … which will probably fry your camera. Then again, if you take it ‘off camera’ with a trigger device, Bob is your uncle!
You could also add colour gels to the flash gun and adapters for direct light. Maybe, for 5 1/2 quid on eBay, you can get a Bendy diffuser/reflector for any flash gun which will soften the light. He also showed a last-o-lite style white reflector to get light back into the image. His one had a black velvet backing to hoover up light behind the subject. All good stuff.
Polarises, how they enrich the colours and take reflections out of the image.
Tripods … get one that’ll let you get down and dirty.
Techniques, how he will manual focus, then put the camera on on burst mode and just rock in and out gently, blasting away to get the shot in focus. Yeah you’ll throw a lot of shots away, but hey, you’ve already brought the memory card. You never know, you might add them together in focus stack in Affinity (other programs are available) to get that perfect shot.
Lastly, he dealt with composition, the hardest lesson of all.
Looking at the shot before you take it …
do you want that twig in there?
Is that leaf too bright?
Can you improve it by moving around?
He showed us a lovely shot of a mushroom and when he got the image up on his computer at home, some simple gardening would’ve made it so so much better. He went back on the next day to find a squirrel or something had knocked it over. He said I could take out the flaws on Affinity, but it reminds me to be better next time.
A great night (though I’m probably easily pleased)
welcome to the guys from Malden CC hope you enjoyed the show
and thanks to Daniel.
Hope we’ll see you again.
Comentarios