It consisted of a Friday party which was an engagement type ceremony, a civil ceremony on the Saturday in Belfast city hall followed by the traditional Indian Wedding on Sunday at Galgorm Manor rounded off with a leaving ceremony on Monday morning. It was a fantastic 4 days.

Here is a sneak peek at some of the shots, I can’t wait to go through all of them!

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Here are some shots from the Easter period, hope you like them!

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I’ll be continuing the ‘Taking better pictures’ theme by using some pictures from Africa. This first picture here is a panorama of Mount Kilimanjaro showing Uhuru peak. There are two main techniques used here. Firstly I cropped the picture to a panorama to emphasise the size of the mountain and I used the path to lead the viewers

Kilimanjaro - Uhuru peak panoramic

This next picture breaks a rule that I taught you a couple of articles back. Here I purposely broke the rule of thirds. This sounds like a contradiction but sometimes it is ok to break the rules. I purposely split the picture in two to help emphasise the reflection that the still water produces, hopefully you’ll agree it works.

Mawenzi reflection

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I was camping in the Mournes one weekend and I took a few pictures. I walked along the Mourne Wall for a while and I thought it would make a nice picture. Below are a few examples of to and how not to take pictures.

Poorly composed picture

This first picture it pretty average. It nearly has the composition right, it is split into thirds horizontally but it doesn’t have anything interesting in it. From left to right it is pretty much the same subject, the ground, the wall and then the sky. Also, I have managed to capture a person in the photo and to be honest, he looks a little out of place within the photo.

This second picture is a little better. I have moved closer to the wall and positioned it to lead the viewer into the picture. However, the wall leads the viewer down into the picture then out of it again without actually showing them anything of interest. Also, I have not kept an eye on the edges of my view finder and I have caught the edge of two people’s coats. On a technical note, the sky is overexposed, I’ll talk more about this in later blogs.

Slightly better composition but the wall leads the viewer out of the picture

This final picture is a good example of composition. We have the foreground, the middle ground and the background well positioned. The wall is used to draw the viewer’s eye into the picture and focus it on the top of the mountain, in this case, Slieve Donard. I shot this in portrait style as it suited the picture better, it helps focus the viewer on the wall and the mountain, for this same reason, I converted it to black and white.

Good composition and the wall leads the viewer to a focal point

Have a go yourself and remember, just have fun and if you get a picture you like PRINT IT OUT! That is the best bit about photography.

Enjoy

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I heard an article on the radio yesterday saying there aren’t enough professional photographers about and I would tend to agree with this. I think the main reason is because of the advent of cheap cameras and also the fact that every mobile phone now has its own camera!! People tend to just snap away in order to get a small memory from a night out. This in itself is fine, I do it myself. However, when it comes to taking a picture of something you wish to hang on your wall or put in an album, the skill set is not there.

Taking pictures takes practise and it also helps to have a little grasp of the basics. This series will aim to help you understand and use some of the basic principles of taking photographs.

For the sake of argument, I’ll call these rules but as we progress we will break these rules, so I guess you could call them ‘rules of thumb’!

The first one is ‘The Rule of Thirds’.
This is probably the most basic of all rules and will instantly transform your pictures. If you look in nature, you will see many things appear in thirds, one such example is the pattern on many sea shells, it often grows by a factor of a third as it spirals outwards. The rule of thirds implies that you split your picture into thirds, horizontally and vertically and place objects or features on these lines or at the intersections of these lines.
Look at the picture below, the first one was taken without considering the rule of thirds. It is an ok picture, it is a nice enough snowy landscape but it lacks an interest.

Quick snap shot

Now consider the second picture, it was taken by moving just a couple of feet and recomposing the image in the viewfinder until I had a foreground – the shore and the lake, a middle ground – the hill, and a background – the blue sky with clouds. I also placed objects near each vertical thirds line to add some interest to the picture.

Recomposed image

This third picture shows how the image looks with the thirds lines overlaid, notice where they fall on the picture. This grid is very useful when composing an image and can be turned on on almost all cameras, check your manual for instructions on how to do this.

Recomposed image with thirds lines overlaid

So there it is, your first lesson on how to take better pictures, go and try it and let me know how you got on.

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