Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Light, Shadow, and Sand Castles with the Olympus Stylus

Today the beginning photography class I'm teaching in Watercolor, Florida moved east on Highway 30A to Rosemary Beach to shoot light and shadow at a sand castle building class. As I mentioned earlier, no one has SLR's, just point and shoots, so I punted, bought a point and shoot, and am teaching the class with that. Although mine is a cool one...it goes underwater for up to 30 minutes, (and got shrieks and gasps at the pool when my youngest, TT, ran over to my beach bag, grabbed it, and jumped with it onto her little crab float into the pool last night with a giant splash, )everyone knows that if you backlight with a point and shoot, you usually get a perfectly exposed background with totally dark, non-detailed faces. Well, it seems that this bad boy Olympus Stylus has the ability to meter on shadow and then transfer its findings to the big picture, so I, of course, didn't have a care in the world. But what about everyone else in the point and shoot world? The answer, my friends, is fill flash. While using a flash in the day time sounds counter intuitive, fill flash will fill in those harsh shadows like nobody's business, and You will be a photography hero in no time when your family sees their bright, shiny faces in pictures, while while still maintaining a nice shadow balance, which means that while your shot will still allow the highlights and shadow to shine through, it won't look all boring and blown out. Everyone's sand castles looked outstanding from our 9 a.m. till 11 a.m. shoot...I'm proud of my class! I can't wait to upload the pictures to show you! By the way, if you have any photos that look a certain way and you can't understand why, email them to me at photobarb@aol.com with a description of what you did, if possible, and I will try to let you know how to change it out the next time. Remember, taking pictures is supposed to be fun!!