Linda & her Nikon D3100 on our 3rd DSLR Photography Lesson - 1st Ave North, St. PetersburgLinda's intensive DSLR Photography Lessons continued this morning once again in downtown St. Petersburg. This was her third lesson in seven days (1st, 2nd). If only all my students were that frequent I could finally get that Porsche 911 Carrera S I have been wanting. Speaking of Porsches, I find out that Linda has quite the knowledge of cars as she even knew a 911 from 1999 would still be the air-cooled version. I was impressed.
For this 2-hour lesson block we mostly setup shop on 1st Avenue North around the 2nd Street North cross street. This stretch of 1st Avenue North is lined with multiple storefronts all displaying different, vibrant colors (see photo above). It is my favorite place to photograph people in downtown St. Pete.
We had practiced flash portrait photographs last time, so today I had Linda focus more on composition and style. I introduced her to the wonders that can happen if you purposefully tilt the horizontal axis in your viewfinder and push the shutter. The off center shot is not a style one would want to do a majority of the time, but I do like to toss in a few of this style of shot every now and then to spice things up.
I also had Linda shoot from a lower than eye-level perspective with her Nikon D3100 to produce a creative forced perspective portrait.
Having covered a most of the areas I like to shoot at in downtown St. Petersburg, our fourth lesson, already scheduled for Friday morning, will be at John's Pass Village!
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The lines of the curb act as leading lines to the main subject, The Pier - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/5.6 ISO 200 1/500thUsing leading lines is one of my favorite composition techniques. In the photograph of The Pier above, everything points to the main subject drawing the viewer's eye across the full length of the frame. The entire foreground of the photograph uses the curb as a leading line to the focus of the image. If there was no curb and just black pavement, then having such a large empty foreground would be a waste of space in the frame. However, using the curb as a leading line adds another element of interest to the photograph besides The Pier itself.