Photography Tips

First DSLR Photography Lesson with Michael and his Nikon D3000

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Michael locks in on downtown St Petersburg during our first DSLR Photography Lesson

Michael is heading to Boston on Thursday, so I was glad my schedule allowed us to have our first DSLR Photography Lesson together before his trip.  Boston is quite a photographic town, though I have not visited it in a decade.  Michael bought a refurbished Nikon D3000 with both kit lenses online, a very good way to save some money.  I, myself, bought my Nikon D300 used in a trusted camera shop in Tokyo.  I would be a little bit careful buying a used camera body.  However, I am much less worried about buying used lenses, and in fact the two most expensive out of my four lenses were bought used.  

The Pier provides the backdrop for the last stop during our 2-hour DSLR Photography Lesson

Michael had been getting familiar with the menus, buttons and dials on his D3000, so he was quickly able to change to the settings I recommended for photographing landscapes (f/11, ISO 100), or for making a photograph with lots of bokeh (blurred background).  We even had a chance to try and capture pelicans flying right past our heads, which proved no small challenge!

I am sure Michael will be able to put to use the skills we practiced today in Boston and return with some great shots of Bean Town.  He showed himself to have a good memory for camera settings and an eagerness to master his D3000.  I look forward to seeing his shots and to our next lesson when he returns.

DSLR Photography Lesson #2 with Melanie and very senior softball!

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Melanie and her Nikon D90 showing good shooting form, left palm under the lens, elbow locked in.

It was yet another blustery, chilly Saint Petersburg morning for the DSLR Photography Lesson I had with Melanie today, her second lesson.  At least it was sunny.  For this lesson, we focused almost entirely on shooting sports, to be specific, the 3/4th Century Softball club.  I will be profiling them in detail in a post next week.  

You have to of had your 74th birthday to play softball with these guys!

We were able to get right on the field for the softball game, along the third baseline.   I taught Melanie how to best hold her Nikon D90 in portrait orientation mode.  In general we focused a lot on making sure she was holding her camera in optimal position for producing  a sharp shot throughout the lesson.  

The other major focus of the lesson was, well, focus.  How to get a focus lock on a moving subject at various distances from the lens.  For this we used both single and multi-point focus, showing the strengths and weaknesses of each for photographing a team sport like softball.

It was a challenging type of photography for just our second lesson, but Melanie was able to produce some nice action shots of players rounding third especially.  For our next lesson, we will switch to architecture and landscapes, subjects a bit easier to get a focus lock on!

2 Strobe DSLR Photography Lesson with Kelley

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Two strobes better than one? Kelley practiced using both his stobes during our latest DSLR photography lesson

DSLR Photography Lessons with Kelley continue to up the ante.  Today we exclusively shot with his two strobes, one off camera and the other on his Canon 7D's hotshoe.  The USF St. Petersburg Campus was our location for today, hoping to see a lot of students walking by who would not mind stopping to be our model for a shot or two.  Unfortunately we arrived just as classes started and the campus was fairly sparse.  We did get a couple of people to step in front of the strobes, including a skateboarder.  

First we practiced with me as the model as I helped Kelley dial in the best settings for shooting in Florida's harsh direct sunlight.  These are of course not ideal conditions, but we wanted to start with a challenge.  The settings we used were:

  • manual exposure (mode)
  • f/14
  • ISO 100/200
  • 1/250th
  • strobes 1/2 power

Those settings can vary by the power of your strobes, what type of diffusion (cap diffuser, softbox, umbrella) and position of the sun relevant to the model.  However, they can be used as a starting point and adjusted from there.

We next tried to make a photograph of a model (um, me) in shade near a wall without casting a shadow.  This was perhaps the biggest challenge of the day.  With a little experimenting we were able to get some satisfactory results, all things considered.

The strobist fun will continue next week when we have our 4th lesson on the University of Tampa campus.  Thanks Kelley for bringing all your photo gear out to St. Petersburg!

Andrea takes DSLR Lesson #4 - all on a tripod

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The first DSLR photography lesson all on a tripod. Andrea photographs an unusual waterfall in downtown St Petersburg

Andrea took her first DSLR Photography Lesson with me just last month, but today was already our fourth lesson (1st, 2nd, 3rd), thank you Andrea!  Today we kept her Nikon D3000 on a tripod the entire time.  We intended to photograph landscapes, but upcoming preparations for a grand prix race put a bit of a barrier on that.  Still, we covered many photography composition styles, like repetition, leading lines and S-curves.  

Tripods slow down your photography, in a good way.  This lesson we took our time and really focused on getting the composition just right before pushing the shutter.  

We ended the lesson making black & white shots.  It was sunset time, but we had no cooperation from mother nature with completely overcast skies, so with no color to capture I made the suggestion that we should shoot with the intention of making black & white images.  I usually decide to make an image black & white when the colors in it do not pop, or I want to focus on the contrast between light and dark directly.  

I look forward to seeing Andrea's shots of a banyan tree and a seemingly ordinary sidewalk especially.  

Andrea told me she ordered the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D lens, so our next lesson will focus entirely on using that lens.  I am sure she will capture some great shallow DoF shots.

A Duo for a DSLR Photography Lesson

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My first time to teach a pair of DSLR Photography students (Vinoy Park)

I promote my DSLR Photography Lessons as a chance to learn 1-on-1 with me on location, actually out taking photos, not just getting lectured in a classroom then given homework assignments.  However, I had a request by a new student to bring a friend to take the lesson with her as well.  Thus, Kellie and Amanda were my first time to teach a pair of students at once.  It was also Amanda's birthday and her present was a new Olympus DSLR!  It seems a lot of people are getting DSLRs and/or DSLR lessons as birthday gifts lately!

Kellie and Amanda had some traces of photography knowledge left over from when they used SLR film cameras, but basically we started from the meaning of aperture and built on that for the rest of the lesson.  For a first lesson about how to use a DSLR camera, I base it on aperture.  Even for me, aperture is the first setting I adjust when I begin shooting.  

Having two students freed me from having to be the test subject for practicing continuous focus shooting!  However, I did take up that duty for practicing flash portraits at the end of the lesson.  

It was definitely more challenging and a different dynamic teaching two students at once, but it also offered a few new opportunities as well.  I hope Amanda and Kellie help each other when they next go out shooting and I look forward to our next lesson.

5th DSLR Photography Lesson with Rosa - Architecture

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Rosa using her Canon T1i to photograph some of the modern architecture in downtown St Petersburg

My longest tenured DSLR Photography Lesson student, Rosa, just took her 5th lesson on Sunday (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th).  Thank you Rosa for your continued interest in photography lessons!  We have already covered many topics, including using external flash for portraits, photographing your children playing sports, as well as shooting in low light.  For our 5th lesson we focused on architecture, and briefly on macro, one of the most challenging forms of photography.  As is often the case, downtown St. Petersburg served as the backdrop.  

I like to have foreground objects when photographing architecture whenever possible.

Of course, as with most forms of outdoor photography, the best time to photography architecture is during the golden hours around sunrise and sunset.  Given that our lesson was from 10am to 12pm, we focused more on what I think is the other key to architecture photography besides the light, that is, angles.  The angles you can find in any given structure of interest are what I usually focus on first, then the next angle is the angle I will compose my photograph from.  

Rosa started to find her own interesting angles as our lesson went on, which to me is the goal of these lessons - to point the student in the right direction then let them go where their own creativity takes them.  

Thanks again to Rosa and I look forward to even more lessons on into 2010.

DSLR Photography Lesson with Melanie around St. Petersburg History Museum

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A smiling new Nikon D90 user, Melanie was eager to learn during our first lesson.

Melanie was a referral from another DSLR Photography student (Danielle, thanks!).  We actually had to reschedule two times because of the unusually bad Florida winter weather.  So we were both happy to finally have a lesson, and on a nice sunny day to boot.  Like many of my students, she just very recently purchased her DSLR, a Nikon D90.  

We covered the basic range of must know settings to get started making photographs with any DSLR, including aperture, ISO and shutter speed.  We then applied these to making photographs with a shallow depth of focus (DoF) in order to make an image with nice bokeh.  Getting the settings dialed in to freeze moving objects was another topic we covered, the key to that being putting your camera into its continuous focus mode, which on Nikon is AF-C and on Canon is AI-servo.  

We ended with a brief introduction on using flash to create well exposed portraits.  Melanie just used her on camera flash, then I showed her the portrait I made of her (see above) using off camera flash, and I think she may soon be the owner of a new Nikon SB-600 Speelight!

I look forward to our next lesson and helping Melanie build on the photography topics we touched on in our first lesson.