autumn in west yorkshire photography workshop

Although there certainly are a few iconic areas that do draw photographers from far and wide to photograph the seasonal changes, in West Yorkshire we are lucky enough to be blessed with a diverse array of outstandingly beautiful locations, that only improve even more under a canopy of intense autumnal colour. I've done my fair share of travelling to many of the popular areas, such as the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, the Peak District etc and enjoyed photographing them all very much. However, I'd have to say that some of my own personal favourite images have come from much closer to home at this time of year, and many came as quite a surprise, from areas that I really hadn't thought of as photography locations until quite recently.

The Autumn in West Yorkshire Photography Workshop will focus on a selection of my favourite areas to photograph the Autumn colours. As with many of my workshops, we won't really work to a rigid location plan, rather we will work with the prevailing conditions, as some areas will suit certain weather and circumstances better than others. It's possible that we will photograph wide sweeping views, possibly hills and moorland, but the majority of the workshop will focus on or around areas of woodland, or wooded valleys, possibly including streams/rivers and waterfalls, where the colours should be at or certainly very near their peak. I tend to think of most of these locations as fairly local, but we could end up photographing any combination of areas such as Leeds, Wakefield, Brighouse, Mirfield, Hebden Bridge or Todmorden to name just a few. There's also a possibility that we might head just over the border to one or two locations in south Yorkshire.

As with many if not all of my workshops now, I aim to head for new areas which are not overly, if at all photographed by other photographers. This means the likelihood is that we will have the majority of these locations all to ourselves, meaning we can spread out in order to make the best compositions possible without getting in each others way. The Autumn in West Yorkshire Photography Workshop is a full day workshop, starting at 07:00 am and concluding at 17:00 pm. On booking you will receive a simple questionnaire to fill out which helps me to tailor the day exactly to your requirements. Depending on your experience, a typical day can include tuition on the following subjects; Best practice camera set-up, shooting manual and Raw Format and the reasons why, creative uses of both shutter speed and apertures, explanations of exposure, metering, bracketing e.t.c, manual focusing for maximum depth of field (Also known as Hyperfocal focusing) The use of filters, both exposure balancing (Neutral Density Graduated) and creative effects (Polarisers, Straight Neutral Density) This leaves the best part of the day free to discuss the broader and more subjective topic of composition. What makes a good image? Elements to look for when composing images, The rules of composition, possible instances of when to follow them and when to break them, use of depth, scale, distance and perspective, shoot and location planning around seasonal and differing lighting conditions, with the main aim being that you can go away and successfully plan the best times of year to photograph your own set of locations.

If time permits, I also go through a typical Photoshop workflow, demonstrating the adjustments used from Rawfile through to outputting images for web and print. This also covers some alternatives to using Neutral Density Graduated Filters, in the form of Exposure Blending incorporating alpha channels / luminosity selections and layer masks.