Photography Course, Food Festival and Fun with Hector

Hello and welcome to our latest adventure where we headed into London with the goal of being a little more informed on how to work our big fan-dangled camera. I mean it does take awesome pictures, but up until now we knew very little about how to use all of its options . 

I have been inspired to pursue the photography avenue a little further after I upgraded our camera bag and bought a tripod for my birthday. So I found this 2.5 hour course online on a website called Obby.  

Obby is fantastic if you live in London, but means nothing to you if you don't. 
Obby is a platform for any courses that are running the the London area - be it photography, cooking, drawing, dancing, painting, soap making etc.. there are a range of courses that are available with all sorts of prices and schedules, and you can just go on the website and search whatever it is that you want to learn! (obby.co.uk)

So we picked a cheap short little course that looked like it would afford us the time to to learn but then to go out and explore more of London and taste some awesome vegan food. 

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The day started out as with a trip to Gatwick airport to drop off my cousin who had been staying with us for the past week. 
Once that was done it was a trip home and park the car before heading into London. 

We caught the train in, and Kyran had a little pre-adventure meditation session. 
Seriously this man can sleep anywhere! I'm not sure whether to be angry or jealous... 

Once we got into London Waterloo station we had to take the tube to Liverpool Street station and then walk to get to the Old Spitalfields Market. 

If you are a frequent reader of our blog you will find that this sounds familiar as we had stumbled upon ithis market previously and in fact you might remember we found some weird Ethiopian vegan food with florescent peas!(see below)(Previous Blog)

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It was a weird "meet in the corner of the market by the coffee shop with your camera gear and I will know it is you" kind of meeting. But we found each other quite quickly and to our surprise we (Kyran and I) were the only people booked for that session. This worked out well because we had a lot of questions. 

It was a cooler rainy day so we took advantage of the diffused lighting conditions and got straight into it!

I thought that I would give you a quick run down on photography that we learned:

There are three major settings that we can alter while we are using our camera and a million things that we can do when we get the photos on the computer. 
But lets look at the camera:

1. ISO (International Standards Organisation,measurement of light sensitivity of film/camera), 
2.Shutter speed, and
3. Aperture 

Put really simply altering each of these three things with either make an image lighter or darker. There are various side effects for changes to each (positive and sometimes negative) so careful consideration needs to be used for adjusting the settings to get the desire shot. 

So here are the exercises that we did:

Altering ISO:

Altering Shutter speed:

Aperture: 

Then once you get the hang of the lighter darker principles then you can start to use the three features/ variables and start to look at their other properties.

Saturation:

Focus and blurring the background:

Using a long focal length and a wide aperture gives a smaller depth of field so when focused on something in the mid-ground, the background will be blurred or out of focus. The other way to get a tight depth of field is just a byproduct of using extreme telefocal lenses, like our Tamron macro lens with ~300mm focal length. 


White Balance and temperature of light:

Using the camera's built in white-balance settings we can make it apply additional colours to try to balance out the natural/external light sources and make white appear more 'white'. There are some neat side effects of purposefully choosing the wrong white-balance settings, like the very 'blue' tone on the middle image. The image on the right has a nice warm feeling to it, also due to added colour from white-balance. 

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That was a really really quick run-down on what we learned and some of the skills that we now had to practice! 
This worked out well though, as the next day we were off for some more adventures to visit Kyran's brother, sister in-law and little Nephew Hector.

The plan was to go for a bike ride to a local food festival and then just take in the surroundings.

So here are some photos that we took along the way (they were taken on my/ Kyrans' phone so nothing to do with the lessons from the day before yet, other than his amazing skills at framing a shot of course!)

Here are some of the photos that we took practising our newly learned skills

Finally here are some photos that I combined our newly learned photography skills and my still developing photo editing skills and we ended up with these:

All in all it was a good day it was nice to go for a bike ride and fin to explore a farm with Hector (even if he was trying to catch dinosaurs the whore time in a game on my phone).

As a extra little something to make up for the lack of food pics from a food festival here is a photo of my breakfast... Ben & Jerry's vegan icecream on waffles with maple syrup!

While we are talking about extras, for those of you who are not aware yet I do also have an Instagram and Facebook page dedicated to the crafty adventures that I embark upon between all the travel and work (also a lot of hash tags). 

#cedesstuff #cedesphotography #cedesnails or 
www.facebook.com/Home-made-hand-crafted-wool-works
https://www.facebook.com/cedesstuff/?ref=bookmarks

So these are some of my projects!

Sewing:

 Nails:

Sculpture:

Graphic Design:

  
These are two of my biggest fans, who liked my design so much they got matching bags.

Well that brings us to the end of another blog, I hope that you enjoyed reading this one! I know that it was a little more creative then adventurous but I promise the next blog is going to be an adventure are we explore another big British Castle!

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Until next time, why don't you try and do something creative and tell us about it!?

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