Keep an eye on the foreground

David Chapman gave an excellent presentation on landscape photography this evening. David is a well-known local photographer. He talked in detail about various landscape techniques. We learnt how to ensure depth of field is appropriate to the subject, i.e. which parts of the shot can be in focus: foreground; mid-ground; background or everything. David emphasised the importance of having some interest in the foreground and using natural lines in the landscape to draw the eye into the picture. He demonstrated how to use the framing grid in the viewfinder to place key parts of the picture. We learnt about graduated filters both as on-camera add on filters and as digital filters in Photoshop or Lightroom.

Our next meeting was to be the field trip to Godrevy with David. He therefore kindly set some homework as preparation! We were asked to download depth of field charts appropriate to our cameras and lenses. David wisely acknowledged that memorising the charts would be a challenge! (Some of our members are over 45!) He suggested we learnt the depths of field for a few different apertures.

The evening was closed with a short viewing of members’ pictures taken at the Outsid’er Festival Sunset Photography session at Wheal Coates earlier in the month. It became clear that the members who had been able to withstand the cold for longer than the others were treated to a vivid final few minutes of the sunset.

Words by Brian Guttridge.