Vernon Photography Workshops are nearly done!

Yup, you read that right. We’re nearing the end of round 10 of photography classes at the caetani house, so it means that the last round until winter is coming up soon. Really soon, actually. The next round will be in early may. I’ll be advertising it once I secure the space – which should be sometime this week. I like to go back and forth between Monday and Wednesday as well – some people can make it on Wednesday, but can’t make it on Monday. This has to be the last round because I’ve got weddings coming up! Between the Vegas photos, baby photos, and the weddings, it’s already getting pretty busy!

Thanks Cheryl Skipper for getting this great shot of me helping out a student!

If you guys are wondering why all those tripods were at the Vernon roundabout, well, that was us. We were playing with long exposures. The second class has one of the biggest workshops of them all. We head up the street and take long exposures of traffic. That gives me a chance to have a little bit of 1 on 1 time with each student. Normally we just have to do change a setting or two, and away we go! We also take really short exposures – this shows off how to freeze even the fastest moving action.

Next up we get into our photography walk. We met up at BX Dog Park. For the beginner students, we went over rules of depth. For the advanced students, it was flash use all the way! We talked about the light falloff, and a little bit about posing.

When it’s a little colder, we have fewer models to work with. Fortunately, a few of the parents brought their kids so we didn’t have to use each other as models. Phew! I still had a lot of pictures taken of me, though. I like to stress the basics – how to change your camera settings quickly so you can get a photo any time. I find the biggest barrier between people who use their cameras every day and people who don’t are the settings.

It makes sense just to have some default settings you can use in any situation. That way, you can just grab your camera and go! Candid moments are often the best moments. Here’s a long exposure of the water.

To finish off, we went into the forest and experimented with a few different kinds of shots. We were lucky to have some hard light come through. Hard light is funny – when you first start taking photos, you hate it because of the harsh shadows it casts on the faces. When you get better, you hate cloudy days because of the greyness. Spots like this couldn’t happen in the forest without the sun shining right through. If there’s a cloud in front of the sun, you lose your sunbeams because your light gets soft.

That’s all for now! Thanks for checking in. If you’d like to know when sign ups are upon for the final round of photography lessons until winter, just keep your eyes on my facebook, and my twitter. Talk to you soon!