Photoshoot Tips

As the weather is getting warmer and the nights are getting longer; what better to do than go outside, enjoy than sun and take cool photographs with your friends.

As photography student  Kate and I are encouraged to take around 15-20 pictures per shoot. Although I often take a lot more than that.

Tip 1: Try to take at least 15-20 photographs per shoot to make sure you get images lots of good images, to post to instagram or just to print out and get framed.

Tip 2: Go on a walk round your local village or town and as you find a nice background, like the one up here, take a few pictures.

Tip 3: Find areas with gaps of shadows and spots of light, like wooden fences or rows of dark shaded trees. These photographs may not work but if you don't try you will never know.

These photographs just above had so much potential and some of them work better than others, but they are quite "busy" as our photography teacher would say. They have to much going on to let the model shine through.

Tip 4: Try not to make your photographs to busy, otherwise the model might get lost in the background.

Tip 5: Lighting, lighting, lighting. Find natural lighting to compliment your model. If you can find a dark area of trees like this, then you are very lucky because they tend to have little spots of sun coming through the leaves which create lovely shadows.

The area that Kate and I took these images in was a quiet public public footpath next to a small thin stream. As you go further down the path you will see: to your left the small stream and to your right a beautiful pond with ducks swimming around, they often climb out of the pond to walk along the path with people, especially if they have bread with them.

Tip 6: This one is possibly the most important if you want to have a laugh with your models. To build a good rapport with your model, it means to communicate and have fun with your models.
 If you are taking pictures with your friends this summer then its not that important because chatting and joking around might not be to hard. Some examples of the happy and funny pictures you can take when building a rapport with your model are below.

Tip 7: Composition, as a photography student this is one of the first things we learnt.
Rule of thirds is one of the main compositions I use as well as 50/50. One of the easiest compositions to explain is 50/50 it basically means that something in your photo spits the frame into two parts. A variation of 50/50 is to have one thing in the frame that fills half of the picture. Its a little bit like the photograph above of Kate's red camera. For the rule of thirds you have to imagine a grid on your picture, although some cameras have the grid on screen, if your subject/model is on the third line, which can be vertical or horizontal. Ta da! You have your rule of thirds composition.

What are your plans this summer?

Joyfully Light

My Little Organic Vegetable Patch

Eleven weeks ago, April 10th. Mum and I went to a garden center, bought 4 strawberry plants and a big raspberry plant which we split up and spread along the edge of the vegetable patch. We also bought a small rhubarb plant to go next to the strawberries. Mum had a few old strawberry plants which in previous years the birds had got to before us, unfortunately. So we moved them into our vegetable patch and so far the birds haven't got them. Some of the strawberries have little green strawberries coming from the center of the flowers and others have white flowers and are creating new shoots that will spread out and grow into more strawberry plants.

We also have two types of peas and a sweet pea flower that grows up bamboo sticks. The sweet pea's have very nice white flowers with the exception of a tiny little red flower. The flowers with the green stripes on are the peas and you can see pods starting to grow if you look closely. There are four bamboo sticks  that are secured with gardeners string to form a strong structure that the peas and sweet peas will grow up, they also add some interesting height to the garden as well as saving us some space in our small 6 by 10 foot vegetable patch.

These lovely, "Oriental Spicy Leaves" were gifted to Mum after they were won in a raffle but were not wanted. Same goes with the Cabbage that you can see in the boxes in the picture below this. One of Mum's birthday presents this year was a personalised grow your own salad box. The gift contained all that you needed to grow a variety of different salads; one of them being the oriental spicy leaves. Mum planted them on the 30th May but despite the packets of seeds saying they would .take 3 weeks to grow, well ours haven't. Although they shouldn't be far off as she planted them just about 1 month ago.

Aubergine, Leek, Garlic, Spinach and Sage are the newer additions to the vegetable patch and theylook as if they are doing quite well. The garlic was added because we had found a clove of garlic in the cupboard that had started to grow a shoot. Mum also said it is quite an easy plant to grow. We separated the leeks into a line next to the peas. Aubergine was added a few weeks ago after we had been unsuccessful with 3 courgettes plants that died. Not exactly sure why but if anyone knows feel free to comment. One of the second things we bought was Lemon Balm and Sage. I chose Sage so we could use it in our cooking and Lemon Balm well not for any reason in particular just because it smelt nice at the garden center.

Have you ever grown your own fruit or vegetables?

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