My final module in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course is street photography, so I’ve set the Art Filter my Olympus OM E-10 DSLR to ‘Grainy Film’ and headed to Ossett Market.
Sitting on a bench looking down at the flip-up screen, I can snap away without being spotted. So apologies if you’ve ended up on one of my photos.
I like the low viewpoint that I get from a bench but to get the feel of a market I tried browsing the bookstall while ‘shooting from the hip’. But I’ve been spotted… .
“Are you capturing the moment?” asks the man on the mobile phone accessories stall.
How can I do street photography without including a pair of street preachers?
As we head home we meet Ruth Nettleton. As she’s the local historian who wrote a centennial history of Ossett Town Hall, I photograph her with the current restoration work behind her.
Today’s module in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course explores movement, so he suggests techniques to freeze or alternatively blur the action of speeding vehicles or to capture traffic trails at night but I’ve headed for Coxley Beck to try some long exposures of flowing water.
For these one- to two-second exposures a tripod was essential and, as with the macro flower shots yesterday, using an app on my iPhone to trigger the camera and set the focus point made things a lot easier than squinting through the viewfinder. It also cut out any chance of camera shake.
I’m out with my Olympus DSLR again and today it’s the portrait module from Ben Hawkins’ book, The Complete Beginner’s Photography Course. That includes a portrait of hands, so I set up a mirror and photographed my ‘all-fingers-and-thumbs’ method of holding the camera.
For older gnarly hands like mine Ben suggests going for black and white and adding a bit of grain.
Pet Portraits
Our next challenge was pet portraits, although challenge is hardly the right word as it would be impossible to take a bad photo of Bertie.
“Does he mind having his photograph taken?” I asked the woman at the next table in the Little Owl cafe, RSPB St Aidans.
“He loves it!” she replied showing me her phone with Bertie filling the home screen.
In the book Ben Hawkins suggests setting the shutter of your camera to silent when photographing pets and you can see that Bertie was getting a tad suspicious by the time I took this, the second photograph.
Add Context
We’re asked for a portrait with the figure in context so as we sat in the Rivers Meet Cafe in Methley, I couldn’t help thinking that the busy sewing room, with the Monday morning class hard at work, would be a brilliant setting. I got what I was after straight away, or I thought I had when I checked the photo on the camera’s flip-up screen. It was only when I got it on the big screen back home that I realised that I’d caught my model mid blink. Moral: always take several shots.
On location and I’ve brought my trusty 1950 Bedford delivery van with me.
We’re on assignment because I’ve just started Ben Hawkins’ The Complete Beginner’s Photography Course, A Modular System for Success and the park at Nostell Priory is an ideal location to complete the Landscape section, including this attempt at ‘forced perspective’, creating an illusion with a toy car.
It worked better on the lichen encrusted capstones on the old park wall than it did in the sunlit courtyard at the stables because I couldn’t get the camera down far enough to get ‘eye level’ at about the height of the van roof.
The Rule of Thirds
But there’s more to landscape photography than toy cars – or as Ben suggests we call them ‘the right props’. He starts with the rule of thirds.
Then adds a focal point – again, to have most impact, at a junction of thirds.
Lead-in Line
His next suggestion is to create depth by adding a lead-in line, such as a path or shoreline.
Framing
And of course you can frame a landscape with an overhanging branch, a tree trunk, a bench or even a Robert Adam bridge.
The only shot that I struggled with for technical reasons was one which showed a still landscape with one element moving and blurred – such as cascading water or windswept grasses.
I need to try again with a tripod and, as a long exposure is needed, on a duller day.
Intentional Camera Movement
This was my attempt at ICM – intentional camera movement – a rowan with plenty of ripe berries. It’s intended to give an impressionist effect.
The flower border in June: buttercup seed-head, cornflower, lady’s mantle, marigold, lavender, salvia, annual meadow-grass, seed-pod (lupin?), white clover and red clover.
These are taken on my newly-repaired Olympus OM-D E-M10 II using the 60mm macro lens. Good to have it back. I could have taken very similar photographs on my iPhone but the digital SLR camera gives me more control.
Meadow vetchling, heath bedstraw and cocksfoot grass in the Deer Park at Wentworth Castle, artichoke, a grass-head, a multi-stemmed cypress trunk and a dead hedge in the gardens around the house.
Taken using the macro lens on my Olympus OM10-D E-10 MarkII DSLR except for the cypress, taken on my iPhone 11, as I couldn’t get the angle that I was after with the macro.
Since lockdown began I’ve taken hundreds of photographs on my new iPhone, which has got me back into photography, but I’ve neglected my regular camera, an Olympus E-M10 Mark II DSLR, so I thought I’d make a point going back to learning a bit more about it. Since I last used it there’s been a software update, so I experimented with the filters in Olympus Workspace. This is the Key Line art filter with an added blue cast. I like the effect; it reminds me of my experiments in photography on my Foundation Course at Batley School of Art. In the print studio someone put the four Richard Avedon portraits of The Beatles on the wall. The psychedelic pop-art effects Avedon used were similar to this Key Line filter, but he must have achieved the effect without the help of computers.
My new camera, the Olympus OM-D E-10 MarkII, a mirrorless ‘micro four thirds’ which is a sort of lighter, scaled down version of a digital SLR, a middle of the range camera but with almost all the features of its big brothers. It has a smaller sensor but there wouldn’t be any problems printing out a photographs at A4 size. You can film HD video and even 4K on a time lapse setting.
Jessops are currently doing a deal on a kit that includes the camera body plus an everyday kind of zoom lens and another that is more powerful, which I look forward to trying the next time we visit a bird reserve. I’ve also treated myself to a macro lens as at least 50% of my photography involves close-ups of flowers, fungi and fossils.
Welsh Poppy
It’s certainly one up on my previous bridge camera, which has given me a useful way of getting into more serious photography over the last three years.
Germander Speedwell
When it comes to throwing the background out of focus, for instance in this close-up of germander speedwell taken with the new camera on our front lawn, the bridge camera was rather limited as you were given a choice of only two apertures. You need a wide aperture, which lets in more light but gives you correspondingly less depth of field, and a faster shutter speed to isolate a subject in this way.
I was inspired to take the plunge and finally go for the camera by our walk around Askham Bog with members of the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society last weekend. Several of the Nats had flip up viewfinders on their cameras which made photographing a flower at ground level a whole lot easier. I was using my little Olympus Tough, which is the size of a bar of soap, on the day and, with the viewfinder hidden down amongst the grass stems the process involved a lot of guesswork. My bridge camera was also lacking in this respect.
The viewfinder/touchscreen also tilts downwards so that I was able to hold the camera above my head and take this close-up of a clump of moss on the garage roof.
Rowan blossom.Bleeding Heart, Dicentra formosa
The Olympus E-10 also gives you the option of a regular viewfinder. When you put your eye to the viewfinder it switches on and the touchscreen viewfinder on the back switches off. Perhaps holding the camera braced against my eye will help me keep it steady.
I feature that I’ve yet to drill down through the menus to activate is the 5 way image stabilisation, which is reviews suggest works even better than the 3 way image stabilisation in the previous model of the E-10.
