I’ve had an interest in photography for a long time, but in reality, I’ve never really had much of an idea about what it means to take a decent photo. I’ve had a Canon DSLR for some time, but it always remained in auto mode. I had zero idea about aperture settings and shutter speeds, and even less of an idea about ISO.
I bought me and the wife an online photography course from The School of Photography and I treated myself to a Nikon Z6 II.
My father in-law is a keen photographer and he goes on a couple of group photography trips a year, and has produced some fantastic photographs. We therefore decided that the 3 of us (me, the wife and the father in-law) should take a weekend trip to the Lake District and practise what we had learned online.
This is the first post of my journey into photography.
We stayed at the Old Stamp House in the middle of Ambleside. It was a great location, easy to get to and plenty of places to eat and drink, but also, so many amazing places nearby to photograph.
We first visited Rydal Water for sun rise and took a few down by the water’s edge. Then ventured up to Rydal Cave and took what I thought were a couple of decent shots. It wasn’t until later when my father in-law asked what ISO I had it set to, and realised that it was set to auto, an most of my photos were at something crazy like 14400 due to my complete lack of understanding of how to control my camera.
I was, however, pleased to see that at the end of the day there was a huge difference in quality of the photos taken at the beginning of the day vs those taken at the end of the day. Which you’ll hopefully see in the gallery.
On day 2 we headed to Blea Tarn for sunrise and to my surprise, a follow photographer sprinted past us as we walked to the water’s edge so that she could get set up first in the best spot. I didn’t realise it was this cut throat! The location was amazing though, and it offered plenty of opportunity to experiment with long exposures. I was however very jealous of my farther in-laws ND filters. That later became my next purchase.
After this was a stop off at Tarn Hows which was a beautiful spot with plenty of locations. It was however a glorious day with hardly a cloud in the sky, which didn’t make for the most interesting of shots. This became more of a playground for experimenting a bit more.
Finally we stopped off at a jetty on Coniston Water where I borrowed some ND filters and got some half decent photos of the water coming over the jetty. They were far from perfect, but I was pretty pleased with some of them.
All-in-all it was a great weekend break. I came away with a couple of ok photos (see below), but more importantly a better understanding and appreciation of what makes a good photograph, and more of an idea of how to get the most out of a camera.
