This year I have met so many frustrated photographers. Camera’s have become much more affordable but we never have the time to learn how to get the most from them.
I’ve set myself the challenge to get you guys taking better photos, ones where you are in charge of the camera not the other way around!
Want to take pictures that you can be proud of?
I’ll be holding a full day all you need to know to make creative choices workshop at The Mansion House, Roundhay Park in Leeds Sunday 1st November 2009.
Running through the functions of your camera I will show you how to use the modes and functions available to get to grips with your photography.
Aimed for beginners through to intermediates you will go away with new ideas and knowledge you can immediately put in to practice.
Full day course £120, gift certificates are available to purchase contact brian@brianharte.co.uk or 0845 257 1758 for more information.
I love it during the ceremony when there is lots of eye contact, exchanged smiles and sometime a fit of giggles as it gives me opportunities to take photos. You cant fake these moments so I know that the couples will love looking at them after the wedding.
I had a couple last year who couldn’t stop looking at each other. From the moment Charlotte entered the Church it was as if she and Charles were the only two people there.
Even the Wakefield wedding videographer Ken Wilson commented on how in-love they were. All I had to do was hitch a ride on their love for one another to get fab photos at both the Church and Bagden Hall.
Charlotte & Charles had booked an old red route master bus to take their guests to Bagden Hall and it made a fab place to do a confetti shot too.
Charlotte’s father had passed away and could not be there for her. Charlotte invited me along as she paid a visit to her father’s grave to lay a flower from her bouquet.
It is times like this where you stand back and give people time and space and I was happy to record the moment for them in their album.
Today I was visiting the National Media Museum with a friend and we decided to make a trip around the photography exhibition. Part of the exhibition was audio visual and part was photography and what struck me was the lack of photography in the photographs.
For me photography has always meant drawing with light (from the Greek phos (meaning light) and graphis (meaning stylus or paintbrush) and although the photographs exhibited were full of concept and semiotics they lacked in photography as I know it. The art of using light to paint a picture is poles apart from simply pointing and shooting.
Last Sunday I shot family photos for a client and old friend. Upon seeing the photographs of their young children the father confessed that there was a world of difference between photographs and photography and when pressed for an explanation told me that any one with a good camera can take a photograph but what I had created for them was completely different. It was a wonderful sentiment that made me stop and think about what photography means to me.
When I hold a training day for eager photographers I say that once you learn to see light as a photographer the world is forever changed. From small things such as observing in a casual conversation how light is striking my friends face, and knowing instantly how to modify it, to seeing a space in the world and seeing the quality of light that is in that space, even before we have arrived at that space. Sometimes that space is a corridor or break in a forest other times it can be that the light has changed all around us with a subtle movement of a cloud or the setting of the sun.
Apart from the art of my profession, photography for me is a social interaction. A perfect blend of entertainment, hospitality and psychology. I love being able to talk, play and explore with people to relax and unlock the social barriers and get photographs that people relate to and empathise with. From the self concious 6 year old girl who thinks she must do as she is told (until she realises she doesn’t) in the photos through to the at first moody teenage boy who opens up when we discover a shared interest in science every one is different and everyone has a story.
No two days are the same…there is always different light and there is always different people which makes me realise that my original career choice to be an optician was working with the right elements of people and light only the wrong mix.
And so to answer my question: photography, for me, is the right mix of light and people.
