An Awkward But Enlightening Afternoon of Photography

This month I had the opportunity to attend a digital photography course through Learn Photography, and it was an experience that’s worth sharing for anyone with even a remote interest in photography. For the course, you need to bring or rent a digital Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera – basically one of those fancier, bulky cameras that come with all sorts of lenses, tripods and so on.

I packed the office camera and met my instructor, James, in front of the Alberta Legislature. For the first 20 minutes James familiarized me with the camera, explaining concepts like shutter time, aperture and ISO. It turns out that these three elements make all the difference when taking a photo. Using them in combination, you can make plated food look like its glowing, capture the aurora borealis, catch a perfect shot of a car moving at speed and much more.

Since we didn’t have plated food, the aurora borealis or speeding cars in the Legislature grounds, I mostly took pictures of trees, statues and James leaping, posing and running. Oddly enough, spending an afternoon photographing an Asian man is a lot more fun and educational than you might think. James took me through the camera modes and menus and showed me how even a point and click camera has the ability to take better photos. Among the neat tips James supplied were:

Photograph people by zooming in from farther away. The more space you create between your subject and the lens, the flatter the picture will be and the more flattering to your subject (simply put, it makes your subject look thinner). On the flipside, many point and clicks add weight due to a curving effect when little or no zoom is used.

Increase your shutter speed at sporting events – but not too much. If you’ve taken a photo of someone running, you’ve likely noticed how their arms and legs turn into windmills of light – much like the road runner hitting his stride. To minimize this effect, you can increase the shutter speed. Increase it too much and the subject is frozen in space with no sense of motion. The magic is to get a slight blur like a national geographic spread with lions on the hunt. I found that 1/60 or one-sixtieth of a second worked for most people-in-motion shots.

Decrease your shutter speed to photograph in low light. If you are taking pictures in shade or dark, using your flash can distort the image – producing halos, glowing eyes and the like. If you slow down your shutter speed to a second or longer, this gives the camera more time to collect the light needed to get the picture. You can also get neat effects, such as a comet trail of light when cars pass in front of the camera. All of these changes can be made on most digital camera settings menus.

There were many more useful tips and I would encourage anyone with an interest to check out classes through http://cameracourses.ca/. They offer group classes on the weekends so that you’ll have more subjects to choose from than just James. And that will probably cut down on the strange looks you’ll get from the construction workers fixing the fountains.