Photocamp 2013

It’s been a busy weekend here.

I must confess I was a little apprehensive about all this. Not really by choice, but simply because I haven’t really found many people as obsessed as I am with taking pictures , much of my photography has been quite solitary, and I’ve not had much time to chat on forums. What would the people be like? Would they all know far more than me?

The first session I joined was run by Si – who I recognize from the Leeds flickr group and as he is quite a distinctive looking chap from seeing him around at many place I go to take pictures. It was on the subject of Event Portraits – something I do a bit of and so I thought this would be interesting to see how different people approach it.

He showed us an impressive selection of characters from various events round Leeds and The North, talking a lot about access and communication – how to get people interested in posing for you. At the time I felt I would of like to hear a little more about settings and techniques, but as I went through the weekend this actually dropped to the back of my mind – I’ll talk more about this later.

Next up was a discussion on Portraits from Lloyd. It took me a while to settle into where he was going with this, but at the end it all clicked into place for me, and made me think a lot about the interaction between shapes and lighting – something that not having done much portrait work I hadn’t really thought a lot about in this context.

After these, I felt I needed a bit more hands on, so I joined a Macro session from Lucinda. Although the room was a bit cramped I managed to have a play with various ideas  – some flower still life, water droplets on CDs and birefringence photography using polarisers and transparent material.

My Tamron 70-300mm with the (pseudo) macro setting steadfastly refused to work (I need to think whether to repair the cable, or upgrade soon) so I was mainly stuck using my normal Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8, though I did have a chance to play with the Canon MPE 65mm, which is basically a lens reversed so that you have the effect of a reversing ring and extension tubes without the hassle. It allows magnification up to 5x which is pretty exciting!

I say without the hassle, but this lens is fiendishly difficult to use, even at f/8 (the limit I could get to without ramping the ISO up ridiculously) the depth of field is minute so you need to use the technique of rocking gently backwards and forth like some deranged mystic to catch the point of focus. I relied on fast burst on my 60D to try and capture something!

After a break for lunch we set off on a photo-walk, which is the part I had most been looking forward to. Anne challenged up to do two things – the main one was to come up with a series of 4 images on a theme from the walk, and to push ourselves creatively. The second suggestion was to attempt to stop and take a shot every 20 paces – though I soon lost this, not through a lack of inspiration or things to find, but because there was so much I wanted to shoot.

I decided to use my Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, and my initial theme was going to be vanishing points – aiming to create entirely regular images with the vanishing point square on the middle AF-point. I moved on a little from this to some very extreme low viewpoint compositions which you can see below.

Overnight on Saturday I was shooting at one of the events I cover, so on Sunday morning I think it is fair to say I was not feeling my best. I crawled out of bed at about 8.30 and managed to jump in a taxi. This cost me a tenner when the driver suddenly seemed to decide to take a totally different route half way there and I was too asleep to argue – so I was hoping it would be worth it!

We started off with a talk on Chromakey techniques from Paula from Ollievision. This is the technique often known as green-screen, where a subject can be shot against a certain coloured background, normally green or blue. This background is then removed in software which is composited with a new background  – for example if a client wants some outdoor shots in their wedding album but the weather says no.

Paula needed an example shot for her tutorial which having a suitable camera to hand I took for her. I worked on a couple myself with quite good effect.

After this we did a bit of portrait with a model, Dee, learning about lighting. Though of course I didn’t set the lights up I am quite plrease with these, especially the shot from behind.

To list what I have brought home from this event (other than some great images)…

1) Get out there and shoot! Obviously some of what we covered was quite technical, but it was also interesting to see people using some pretty basic settings, software presets and so on – if you have it use it. What matters is that at the end you have a great image.

2) Make more prints. This is somewhere I did feel a bit left out, as I didn;t manage to bring in any work for the print shop, or photobooks to look at. I have loads of stuff which is all online, but I invested in a printer because I wanted the tactile experience of making prints on nice paper. Ok, it can be costly, but it is worth it for a product that you can hold.