A few days before the day course the weather forecast wasn’t looking good, with heavy rain and high winds forecast. It proved to be fairly accurate but luckily the heavy rain held off till the afternoon. Thanks to Nigel, Malcolm, Jeff, Chris and Sue?for joining me at the castle with such a poor weather forecast. We broke up the morning session with a retreat to the coffee shop for cake and coffee.
I’m afraid Malcolm had to endure taunts of “red kite” from all of us as he had brought his 100 – 400mm zoom lens and was trying to photograph one of a pair that flew around the castle. Every time he wasn’t quite ready the kite would fly over us, with members of the group bringing it to his attention that he needed to be photographing it asap. At least Nigel didn’t have to get the usual Buzzard?jokes that have become a bit of a running joke when he has his telephoto zoom?with him.
When the heavy rain arrived in the afternoon, we retreated back to the coffee shop and? discussed location planning, with how to read maps and use?google earth, a sun position compass and the photographers ephemeris to help visualise a location and plan the best photographic position. There was a good discussion with the group with everybody learning a few things, especially with the use of digital maps, tablets or phones with GPS modules.
The final session was a run through of basic RAW file processing in Adobe Lightroom. I like to keep my processing fairly simple as for me the challenge of photography is to photograph the conditions that I see in my mind’s eye. Once I have captured that previsualised image in camera, hopefully only basic RAW editing is then required. I find that I need less editing tools now, so Photoshop is used less and less. It still has a few things that Lightroom doesn’t have, but hopefully with future developments of Lightroom these will be added as well.
It’s Dunraven Bay on the Glamorgan Heritage Coast next. I just hope the weather is a bit more photographic friendly and so far the forecast seems to be improving which is good news.
