Chantele and I were recently invited to a night time photography workshop, along with approx. 20 local bloggers at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, which was hosted by Transun and Joe Blog. The evening started with plenty of cups of tea followed by a talk on understanding your DSLR and how to adjust exposure using the 3 main settings found on every DSLR, ISO, Aperture and shutter speed.
Our group had a varied degree of skill level in using and understanding exposure, so we started at the very bottom and worked our way up to how to expose a photograph in the dark of the night by adjusting our settings and prioritising certain aspects of the exposure. We had a little play with our cameras inside (turning the lights off) to make sure everyone was up to speed on adjusting their ISO, shutter speed and aperture settings before venturing outside to have a bit of fun with our cameras, mixed in with some creativity.
The event was a lot of fun and benefitted those who were just starting out to learn how to get out of auto mode on their cameras, and a good excuse to do some networking with local bloggers at the same time. The skills that were taught, taking long exposures and how to adjust your settings were linked in with how to take beautiful images of the Northern Lights, which can be made possible by the expeditions that Transun organise. It really did make us want to take a trip to see and photograph them (it’s on the bucket list!). From a technical aspect we personally didn’t gain any knowledge, but it wasn’t our main intent as we are both photographers by profession, however we met some great people, talked shop with Iguana Photography who took the workshop and came home with a rather good complimentary camera cleaning kit!
I’d love to learn more about night photography! How cool!
Yeah it was pretty interesting, we knew most of the technical stuff, it was just fun to spend some time with some other like minded bloggers.