I’m still riding the high from my attendance at Alison Shaw’s Photography Workshop last week. The link for the workshop is here and Alison has also blogged about the week here.
I mentioned in my previous post that we looked at a lot of images each day as part of the critique sessions. This was enormously helpful for me. The other thing that was a revelation was having Alison review and process her images from the evening shoot at Lucy Vincent beach with us in the classroom.
We arrived at Lucy Vincent beach maybe 2 hours before the sunset and during the course of the evening I went on to fill 4 x 8 Gb memory cards. I know I take a lot of photographs. Most of my photos were just nasty and I would have saved time by not uploading the first 2 cards. The thing that surprised me was that Alison’s photos were too! She didn’t have a special ‘pretty picture’ button on her camera that made everything look good but when the light softened then things began to get interesting.
Of course this is something that I already ‘knew’, after all my buddy Adrian blogs about his early morning adventures frequently and has images to show for his labors, but not something that I had truly internalized. In reality of course there’s no such thing as bad light but rather light that is not appropriate for a particular subject. My intrinsic bias is for more intimate scenes which are often best captured with overcast skies, but I realize that from some of the grander seascapes that I would also like to do justice to there’s no escaping the need to be up early to catch the early morning light and to stay out late to capture subjects at sunset.