Basildon Park Sunday 19th June 2011

Our first  photography workshop  at Basildon park near Reading last Sunday proved a great sucess. This splendid Nation trust Georgian mansion with its glorious gardens and parklands was at its very best.

Our students were able to practise their photography skills shooting the splendid floral displays currently on show in the grounds and gardens and also the wonderful views of the house and surrounding landscapes.

The following photos were taken by Vicky on her Samsung digital SLR.

The following pictures were taken by Tracey. Tracey brought with her a 50mm F1.4lens. This is also what we call a fast lens. Having this lens allows our pictures to be taken with a very small depth of field, this means that we can easily create very blurred backrounds allowing our main subject maximum impact by cutting out background detail which may detract or make our picture too cluttered.

Portraits Using flash

Today our hotshoe mounted flash guns can be used for a wide range of portrait shots From just providing a small amount of fill flash for shooting outdoors to setting up multiple flashgun setups for sophisticated studio style portraits.
Our Portraits using flash courses  can show you how to add spark to your outdoor portraits using fill flash and then how to use your flashgun in both TTL mode and manual mode to control flash output, setup multi flash lighting arrangements and get stunning professional portraits.

The advantage that systems such as the Canon
and Nikon speedlites have is that you can

use them remotely and wirelessley. These

can be set up as a master with up to 3 slaves .

You can set up a small studio in a relatively small space and get great results. We have more of these photogrpahy courses running throughout the year in Windsor,Berks Winchester and Lacock, Wilts

                                                

Portrait workshops in Lacock and Windsor.

We have recently seen a rise in customers booking up to our portrait courses, and of course this makes sense. Everybody wants to take good pictures of family members and friends, and there are some very simple camera techniques which can quickly transform your portraits from snapshots to good portrait photographs.

Lacock Village as seen from our meeting room doorway

Note the Red Lion pub, a very useful spot for refreshments.

In April we had two courses over a weekend in the very picturesque village of  Lacock NR. Chippenham. On the Saturday we worked on taking portraits outdoors in Natural light, and on the Sunday we worked on learning how to take outdoor portraits and studio style portraits using our camera's flashguns.
We are running these very popular Photography courses in Lacock Wiltshire again  in August and December this year

Below are a serious of images taken by some of our students on the recent Portraits Family and friends workshop in Lacock.

Sometimes we can get some event going on as we wonder through the grounds and gardens of some of our venues. On this date there was a female choir performing in the grounds of Lacock Abbey. This provided our students with some good candid portrait photography practice.

A candid shot of a well dressed lady admiring the view.




Female choir

 

.



Portraits against a fairly plane background keep our attention on the subject





Forming small groups into shapes gives more visual appeal.


The following photos were taken by our students on our portrait family & friends photography course in Windsor Berkshire. The backdrop here was the magnificent tree lined avenue of the Windsor castle long walk

 

A small depth of field blurs out the castle in the background. 



Once again a small depth of filed helps to focus our attention on the subject.



Sometimes a tight crop will work even if it does mean cutting the top of someones head off.



Putting your subject to one side of your frame often give  a better composition. Remember the rule of thirds.







 









  



  









 

.