After reading Bryan Peterson’s “Learning to See Creatively” I suddenly came over all creative. Little surprise I suppose given the title. Whilst sitting around on Sunday afternoon I decided to take a visit to the old Jail in Sundays Well. Just to see if I could apply the ol’ one third/two thirds rule along with line, texture, colour, shape, form and possibly one more I’m forgetting.
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Perhaps it would have been a good decision to read a few chapters of Peterson’s “Understanding Exposure” before I undertook the task. It only dawned on me after about 20 or 30 shots that I should consider using my tripod. Silly I know. It might also have been quite intelligent to ramp up the ISO a few stops. I could have just reached into my immense (and currently half empty) backpack and used the cheap remote trigger I picked up on ebay some weeks ago. All of these and more only dawned on me as I was driving home, contemplating if any of the 248 shots I actually took would turn out.
Taking from another of Peterson’s suggestions, I got down on my knees, belly & back and saw the world from another perspective. An interesting development to say the least. Now that I’m learning leaps and bounds about exposing correctly and most important creatively, I’ll be back after the Tall Ships in Waterford next weekend with a plethora(sp?) of underexposed,overexposed,out of focus shots. Among some of those hopefully will be some pictures of old boats. Pity I won’t have my 75-300mm lens for that weekend excursion.
As they were to me, I’d highly recommend both of the above books. Peterson has a way of writing that spells out everything in both plain English and photo tech speak so you can learn as you go along. Donncha recommended them to me and I’m paying it forward to all the other people out there that don’t fully understand their SLR’s; either of the film or digital variety.
