Tuesday’s Tales from the Shoot – Taking Moth off Auto

So this is not a typical Tales from the shoot as such, as I have been fairly quiet in the studio the last week or so. This is about teaching Moth how to use our newly repaired and returned DSLR Camera, which has become his. It appears that the repairers did a brilliant job, with both the camera and the lens. So I must do a quick shout out to Camera Clinic, in Collingwood; BRAVO guys, bravo!

Back on track………Moth has only taken a few shots on auto with this camera (I haven’t let him near the new one til now)so we went to a few spots around Melbourne, nothing of major interest, just places to stop and take our time. I have never really taught anyone to shoot before, so I figured I would start where I started, the Basics. Perhaps I should do some posts, from my point of view………I know there are a lot of posts on how to take photos, how to learn the basics, so maybe, maybe not. Anyway I explained briefly ISO and aperture and then we set the camera to aperture priority and took a few shots, changing the aperture up and down, then adjusting the ISO and seeing how that all changed the shutter speed. I advised him to stay above 1/250 sec and we went from there, as we did not have the tripods with us. He took pictures of what interested him, as he should I do not want to same images as him, he needs his own creative voice, not a duplicate of mine.

We went to some bridges, a park, he got to try my 18-200mm (which he really liked, funny it’s my fav too), he then got to play with the Macro and then the brand new wide angle we have just bought. My aim when we go to Uluru (Ayers Rock) is to have the 10-24 wide on one camera and the 18-200 on the other. So after a while of me telling him some settings and getting to try a few on his own, he started to get the basic hang of it.

We then do a shoot in Marysville, which really gave him a taste and a real case of the photo bug. I am now teaching him Light-room to sort, catalog and edit all his photos, he actually got some really, really good ones. I even made him his own watermark; maybe I should do a feature post of his pics for him? Anyway til next time happy snapping.