Many of my DSLR Photography Lessons end in Vinoy Park with a portrait of the studentA very pleasant morning in St. Petersburg (i.e. minimal wind) greeted Nicole and I for our first DSLR Photography Lesson together. She has had her Nikon D70s for awhile, even taking some online photography courses. However, there is nothing like an photography lesson out in the field where you can get direct, real-time feedback.
Nicole has the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D lens, a very high quality for value lens. I have the same lens myself so we began the lesson using that lens, which is great in low light, in the super bright late morning Florida sunshine. The 50mm f/1.8D lens actually makes a pretty decent landscape lens when stopped down. Of course it is great too at producing a very shallow DoF (depth of focus).
Nicole had not photographed any moving targets yet, so she switched to her Sigma 18-125mm lens and tried to get me in focus as I zig zagged across the history museum's front lawn. Centering the subject when photographing a moving subject is ok to do composition-wise because you should be trying to fill the frame and keep up with the movement of the subject.
We had a lot of fun conversations during the lesson, not all of them restricted to photography. I was interested to hear about the 10 acres of land Nicole lives on!
The end of the lesson covered, briefly, flash portrait photography. Nicole has the same Nikon SB-600 Speedlight that I do, but unfortunately the D70s cannot remotely trigger an external flash so we just practiced with it on the hotshoe. As always, it is fun to show students just how much of a difference flash makes in portraits even with lots of natural, front light on the subject.
I look forward to our next lesson when we will cover a few photography topics in more depth.