Monday, 2 December 2013

Location Lighting with Graham Harries

TENBY AND DISTRICT CAMERA CLUB

The thought of setting up a home studio with lighting can seem a scary prospect; the clubs guest speaker Thursday 28th November was Graham Harries who with his wife Jane travelled from Llanelli to dispel all the myths about location lighting.

Graham is a member of the Llanelli Photographic Society and has a photography business in his home town. The evening began with images showing the flavour and techniques that Graham uses on his shoots, ranging from landscapes to bizarre items. He explained to members that he carried out a 365 project, that meant taking a photograph every day for a whole year, and at present he is doing a self portrait project, one image a day. The content and techniques were outstanding. Recently Graham has been appointed the events photographer for the Scarlet’s Rugby team.

We were shown various essential accessories to use, the camera set ups – he went on to say that there are no fixed rules for setting your camera up for studio portraiture, but there are settings that will ensure better quality shots. To begin with choose the lowest ISO setting on your camera, next set the white balance to flash to ensure accurate colours and tones, it’s best to shoot in manual mode, as this enables you to specify both shutter speed and aperture. Graham explained and demonstrated using his wife as the model, the use of a soft box, white umbrella and various highlight reflectors, Graham’s philosophy was why pay out a lot of money on certain items and accessories when you can get away with using for instance a large white sheet of polystyrene board as a reflector, or fork out for an almost life size soft box, the choice is yours. He finished the evening showing how easy it is to set up a simple but effective lighting unit for perfect portraits. To conclude the evening members were shown several images where lighting had been used to its full potential to bring the best out of the image and its location.

Images of Graham’s work can be seen on his web site at gphotography.org.uk

5th December – Mini competition - Macro

12th December – Reading Photographs a talk by Rob Mitchell and hand in of 2nd open images.


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