spring woodland & bluebells photography workshop

With vibrant coloured, newly grown foliage and the aroma of fresh wild flowers, not to mention the lengthening days and increased sunlight, spring is certainly one of the major seasonal highlights of the year. There’s nothing quite as impressive as walking through lush woodland, with thick carpets of Bluebells as far as the eye can see. This workshop will concentrate on a few distinct locations, chosen for their spectacular display of spring colour and also the compositional challenges they present.

Finding some kind of order among the random chaos of West Yorkshires mature, Beech woodland can be challenging, but using a selection of lenses and different camera formats, including panoramic, I will help you to get the very best images from the day. This workshop will suit all ability levels, from complete novice through to more advanced amateurs.

The Spring Woodland & Bluebells West Yorkshire workshop lasts around ten hours including breaks for meals and refreshments etc. This means that you will receive at least eight hours of on location, tuition. On booking you will receive a simple questionnaire to fill out, which helps me to tailor the tuition exactly to your requirements. A basic day can possibly include tuition on the following subjects, (where required); Best practice camera set-up, shooting manual and Raw Format and the reasons why, creative use 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, so you can go away and successfully plan the best times of year to photograph your own set of locations. I can also tailor tuition to your particular, specific requirements where necessary. Past clients have asked for help on many different subjects and techniques; These have included shooting and processing panoramic images, using tilt & shift lenses, shooting and processing images for focus stacking and exposure blending.

If time and circumstances permit, then I also go through a typical Photoshop workflow, demonstrating the adjustments used from raw file, through to outputting images for web and print. (Usually this is over breakfast or lunch) 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.