We finished off the last of our 8 classes with a photo walk. Although it’s a little colder this time of year, we saw temperatures of around 3 degrees at Polson Park. We like to have a good mix of kids and adults. Adults are fine, but kids tend to not do so well when it’s cold. Here’s to hoping the March classes are a little warmer!

For more details on the next round of classes, click here.

We all headed out to our first exercise – learning to use our flash in the daylight. We all turned our flashes to -4 (about right on a day like this) and adjusted our shutter speed to match.

Once that was finished, we started working on off camera flash. Here’s a better example of the setup for this shot.

By putting the flash into slave mode, you can trigger it with your built in flash. We went through a few off camera exercises, and some instructions on how and when to use OCF.

After, we headed to the bridge to do a long exposure. It gets tricky in the daytime – you must adjust both your shutter speed (2″ in this photo) and your aperture. This gives me a great opportunity to get some hands on teaching time in. After 8 classes, many of the students were doing their own, fancier versions of this shot. All the power to them!

We went into posing and backgrounds a bit. We had a few willing models, so we made sure to take full advantage. You can see the brown from the trees, and the way it makes a “v” shape. That frames our subject, and the muted browns are great colour theory.

Out on the boardwalk, we had startled a few birds. I’ve heard there’s a family of beavers living out there. I don’t go out there often on my own, but I should pretty soon to get some nature photos of those little guys.

We had our own little guy to take photos of. I was a little busy setting up the shot, so I didn’t have a chance to take many photos.

Everyone else did! After this OCF shot, the students showed me the awesome photos they had on their cameras. Really nice work. It’s a challenging shot to get – there’s smoke, a subject running back and forth, and the lighting changes depending if the flash had fired or not.

On the way back to our cars, one of the students told me she had a dickens of a time getting bokeh balls. Well, fortunately I keep christmas lights in my car. It’s all part of being a prepared photographer. We found a chain link fence, then started setting up lights.

A few changes to our settings, and there were bokeh balls everywhere! It comes as a surprise to many that great photos don’t take a huge budget. You can grab some props off aliexpress or amazon and have a stunning shoot. You simply have to be familiar with the theory behind the look that you’re trying to achieve.

And that’s the last class! If you’d like to learn more about signing up for Advanced, or taking the level 1 class, click here.

Thanks for reading this far! To stay updated, give me a follow on facebook, twitter, or instagram. Talk to you soon!