A Lady in London

As if my Africa trip preparations weren’t keeping me busy enough, my boyfriend signed me up for photography classes in London this weekend. He gave them to me as a Christmas gift, and sixteen hours of photography lessons at Take Better Pictures in London Bridge definitely gave me a better eye for composition, a deeper understanding of how my camera works, and a greater appreciation for the powers of Photoshop.

We covered a lot of ground in two days, but the main takeaways were composition, theory, and editing.

The first of those topics covered areas like using diagonals to make a photo more aesthetically pleasing, the “rule of thirds”, or dividing a photo into three vertical portions and positioning our subjects along the dividing lines, and the idea of taking a photograph as either a close-up shot or a contextual picture.

We also covered concepts like color, light, depth of field, and other important aspects of composition. There was plenty of time to put our new knowledge into practice at nearby Borough Market, South Bank, and a bizarre former 18th century cemetery with thousands of tiny trinkets tied to the gate.

The theory part of the course covered the three important technical elements of our cameras: the aperture, or the amount of light the camera lets in; the shutter speed, or how quickly the camera takes the picture; and the ISO, or the sensitivity of the image sensor to light.

We learned their mathematical relationships to one another, the ideal balance of the three elements in taking still shots versus action shots, and their effect on the exposure of the photos we took.

Today we had several chances to put composition and theory together. One photo shoot we did at the cemetery focused on using a wide aperture to practice getting a good depth of field.

Another concentrated on manually changing the exposure of the photos to adjust for shadows and light in the tunnels along the South Bank.

The most fun exercise of the day was on the high street, where we learned the technique of panning. Panning is the art of shooting a moving object. We learned how to take photos while swinging our cameras in a wide arc along with passing automobiles. In fifteen minutes we photographed countless cars, buses, bicycles, motorcycles, and even runners to try to get the perfect shot. It was harder than it looked, not least because I accidentally had my lens zoomed all the way in the whole time.

Following the photo shoots, we spent some time learning techniques on Adobe Photoshop, including how to adjust colors, light, and contrast. We were taught how to remove unwanted objects from photos, crop out unnecessary foreground, turn a color photo into a black-and-white one, and isolate elements of a photo to make them stand out from the rest of the shot.

The weekend was a great experience, and I highly recommend Take Better Pictures as a photography school in London. I can’t wait to get to Africa tomorrow to start putting my new skills into practice. Stay tuned!