framing the photo

Look for a natural frame for your photo.
It creates the feeling of depth as you look
past the frame to your main subject.
The idea is to turn this two dimensional
image into a three dimensional one.

Photography lessons Vancouver

I had the pleasure of teaching Tamara Taggart today.
She has a new Canon SLR and wanted to learn
to use the basic functions such as aperture, shutter
speed, ISO, white balance, fill flash, exposure compensation
etc. In a two hour lesson we practiced those and a few
more technical functions as well as considering a bit
about shooting in window light and with flash.
In just two to three hours you can be introduced to
the dozen or 15 most important functions on your camera.
Many of the other functions are not really needed much
or at least not until you've practiced a lot. The one to one
lesson is way more fun than reading your thick manual.

shooting stained glass using metering mode

Here's a subject where using the metering mode
helps. As the window was surrounded by the
black area of the dark church (I cropped it off)
the camera's meter thinks it should give you an
average exposure based on both the dark area and
the light window. So the exposure will be too bright.
Choose the spot meter mode and meter on the bright
window area for a more accurate reading of the light
that you actually want to photograph.