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.
