Last Thursday night I made it through awful traffic to do a 3 hour photography workshop at the lovely Fox and The Magpie in Bingley, Yorkshire. It is a quirky venue selling gifts, craft kits and all sorts of vintage inspired lady tat that I absolutely love. They run such a variety of courses and workshops including book keeping, photography, quirky crafts, mother and daughter nights, after school crafts and they also offer home shopping parties – so cool.
My photographs always look terrible and I really wanted to discover a few tips and tricks to make basic improvements.We have an SLR camera (given as a gift) but neither of us know what all the different settings are or how to make the most of it. We’re the type of people that keep it on auto everything – auto focus, auto flash, auto this, auto that. Photography is such a talent. I quickly realised how technical photography is, and felt a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know the basic fact that you should rarely use the flash – I’m all into flashing. The class was very flexible, student led and with just three of us there it was easy to squidge a million questions in. It was probably a good thing that there was just the three of us as we all had a lot of questions!…if our tutor felt like he was having his ear chewed off, he certainly didn’t show it. We were taught about how to take stills, how to make the background look blurry, how to shoot movement and the best settings for inside, outside and how to use light. I certainly learnt a lot and the main thing now is practice, practice, practice so that taking a decent photograph happens naturally rather than having to fumble around with all the different knobs and buttons each time. I’m not going to be taking pro photographs anytime soon but now I definitely have a basic understanding of what I need to work on and how to make improvements. I can’t see miracles happening!
I’m sure I will be visiting The Fox and The Magpie again – very tempted by their Nordic Christmas Craft Night in December – it just sounds so much fun!…plus there will be food 🙂 in theme of course.
E xx
