Learning photography means learning to see. Knowing your camera and mastering technique are important steps, but so are understanding light, arranging the elements of an image and discovering what you want it to express.
My approach to teaching brings that knowledge together with practice and experimentation. Composition, colour, lighting and the relationship with the people being photographed are all part of the same creative process.
In this category, I share ideas, resources and lessons related to photography, workshops and courses. These articles explore the decisions behind an image and ways to apply them to real situations.
Whether you are starting out or developing a specialism, the aim is to build judgement and confidence. Experimenting, comparing results and learning from mistakes helps you develop your own perspective, rather than simply following a formula.
Because learning photography is about more than knowing how to take a picture: it also means understanding why we take it that way and how we can take it a step further.
Simple Steps for Dealing with Everyday Damage I’m going to explain how to disassemble an Elinchrom BX 500 Ri flash, an excellent unit from this brand which, in my case, I needed to open after several falls to the ground during outdoor shoots. After a number of falls, the mains power socket and the on/off […]
Something Important if You Don’t Want to Waste Time Although many of you use applications such as Lightroom to catalogue and organise your photographs, today I’m going to explain my own workflow for organising, classifying, storing and managing photo files properly. I like to know exactly where every file is at all times and, just […]
Fundamental Photography Concepts Today I’m going to cover a subject that can be quite confusing: DPI. As you may know, among the many fields stored in the metadata of image files (EXIF), there is one that records the DPI value of a photo. So, what exactly does that mean and what is it used for? […]
An Important Concept in Photography As Wikipedia defines it, the colour temperature of a light source is determined by comparing its colour within the visible spectrum with the light emitted by a black body heated to a particular temperature. For this reason, colour temperature is expressed in kelvin, even though it is not literally a […]
Let’s Not Use Unnecessary Colour Spaces A colour space is essentially the language used to communicate colour information in a photographic file, a printed image or any other medium used to display a photograph. As shown in the diagram, there are different colour spaces designed to describe image information. You can think of them in […]
How different qualities of light are created and why they matter In some of the workshops I have taught recently, I have talked about how different light can be in terms of hardness depending on the lighting system we use. But what exactly is light hardness? We could define it as how sharply defined the […]
