Happy Monday.  It’s been a few days since my last post.  Partly because of my work schedule and partly because I didn’t have anything interesting to show or tell you.  Well that changed this weekend.  It was an event filled weekend and very enjoyable with lots of photography involved.

On Saturday afternoon two friends from Cedar Rapids came to Dubuque to learn some things about their cameras that they didn’t know.  Both recently obtained new Nikon DLSR cameras and have been shooting with them in complete auto mode.  They asked me if I would teach some of the technical aspects about their cameras so that they could get the most out of their cameras.  So about 1:40 p.m. we met at the river walk in Dubuque and started talking about photography in general and the three key elements that control exposure in specific.

The image above is of Barb (L) and Emily (R) just before we got started.  Barb has a Nikon D7000 and Emily has a Nikon D5100.  Both cameras are 16.2 megapixels and are excellent DLSRs.  Both have been shooting in the Auto Mode and shooting only JPEGs.  I talked them into shooting in Aperture Priority Mode and in RAW.  We talked a lot about aperture values, shutter speeds, and ISO sensitivity to control exposure.  The advantage of shooting in APM is it allows you to control your depth of field.

We did not talk about composition rules and each of them had their own style of how they like to shoot.  We only focused on aperture, shutter speed and ISO for the afternoon.  One of the more interesting things of the photo session was as we were walking the river walk and just talking and shooting images.  We encountered five different wedding parties.  Two were going on in the River Center, one at the Grand Harbor and the other two came to the river walk just for a photo shoot.  I shot some images of them all much to the dislike of the “official” wedding shooters and a couple of brides but hey they were out in public and I had my camera.  Besides brides are always beautiful. 🙂

We shot, discussed, and taught for a couple of hours and then stopped at the Star Brewery to review the images they had taken and to  have a quick lesson with Photoshop Lightroom 5 Beta.  They had both downloaded the free beta 5 version and so I showed them my typical work flow to get my RAW images processed.  It was a lot to throw at them all at once but they assured me it was helpful and they want to do it again.  We talked about meeting in Cedar Rapids the next time as there are more of their friends that are in the same situation and want to learn some of the fundamentals.

Anyway it was a lot of fun for me to talk about photography and just shoot a lot of interesting things.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.   That’s it for today.  I’ll show you some of the images from the river walk session plus some family happenings as well later in the week.  Hope you had a great weekend as well.  Enjoy your Monday.  Thank you for stopping by and be careful.