Photography Walk - Belstone
Emily
My second (socially distanced) 'trial run' Photography Walk.
With the talented Emily who is (amongst other things) a photographer herself.
It was a bit of a last minute thing and we decided to meet in Belstone before sunrise and just see where our noses took us!
The village of Belstone is well worth a visit itself (it's not only beautiful, but rather wonderful to boot).
However on this occasion, I wanted to get onto the moor and hopefully catch the sunrise. I'd been in the area as dawn broke before, and had never been lucky enough to capture anything other than rain clouds 😂
As I've mentioned before, my Photography Walks are customised to each persons needs and as our walk was very much an impromptu excursion, we spent much of the outset just taking photographs and getting to know one another.
Emily, a photographer herself, was obviously very impressed with me boring her with details of how I prefer to go about things 😂
One of my tenets of Photography is 'nobody is right all the time' ...
... you may have found a good way to achieve a result, but it doesn't mean you should disallow the advice or process of others.
Let me try to explain with a short story...
Paul tells a story
Industar 52
When I started out taking photography more seriously again and I was excited to discover you could use old film camera lenses on your digital camera, I set about finding myself sources of interesting lenses.
Vintage Lens
Remembering that this was a long time before it became super popular to use vintage lenses, I was overjoyed to find an Israeli camera dealer on eBay who was selling old Soviet lenses at a reasonble price 😍
I counted my pennies and ordered an Industar 52mm f2.8 a beautiful shiny silver version!
I awaited the arrival with expectations raised.
My lovely spangly Soviet lens arrived and I set off out to capture some magic!
Totally rubbish results 🙄
The lens sat on a shelf for a while and eventually made it back into my camera bag when I'd promised myself it really needed another outing.
... Days passed
... Weeks passed.
Then one afternoon, whilst wandering in Hembury Woods close to Buckfastleigh, excited by the sun making an appearance after a fairly standard few days of torrential rain, I spotted the shiny lens in my bag and thought 'What the hell!'
“You should always try things twice - the first time you might not have been concentrating, or you might have even just been asking the wrong questions”
The Industar 52mm f2.8 - it's rather good for that 'fairy tale' feel 😍
So, the moral of the story is never buy a lens from eBay 🤣 ... there is no moral, just never stop listening, never stop experimenting and never give up on something purely because you couldn't achieve what you wanted the first time 😍
And back to the trip around Belstone!
I wasn't sure there was much I could teach Emily, she already has a style and workflow of her own, but I guess sometimes just wandering and chatting is an interesting way to learn.
Although I'd not seen much of Emily's work, she had seen plenty of mine and hopefully enjoyed my more moody, melancholic approach to landscapes.
In the future, I'll be offering group walks and local workshops to explain the basics of photography.
Please be aware that my style of both photography and teaching will most certainly not be to everyones taste 😂
If you like my work, why not get in touch and we can arrange something!
Slowly getting to grips with this 'Photography Walk' thing, and realising I might actually be able to help people improve their photography (or at least get them to approach things in a different way).
So happy Emily found it useful ... and I got some amazing images!
A win - win 😎