And luckily for me, that is pretty quick! Autumn time is my most favourite time to photograph outdoors. Unfortunately our garden seems to be situated in the Bermuda Triangle, everything we buy for it just disappears. I thought I would enjoy gardening more than I do, thankfully we did not buy a house with a large garden, but we certainly thought about it. We had dreams of bees, cosy cows and cuddly pigs running around a small farm.
But some pumpkins did grow, or one did, the courgettes looked good too that is until we cooked one and it tasted like poison, which was unfortunate as I had given one to my neighbour before I had tasted it, I have seen him since but he hasn’t spoken to me since! Made some nice pictures though.
I really like shooting with available light. It took me a while to find a style and I am always learning. The famous photographer Norman Parkinson always shot into the light, that way your model/daughter/bride or whoever is not squinting as they look into your camera.
If you combine this with shooting in the late afternoon or early evening you get the added bonus of maybe getting some flare into the lens and I love flare! And in the autumn you get the sun coming into the lens at some interesting angles.
I once had a Tokina 28-80 zoom that was so awful I should have sent it back as soon as bought it. At F2.8 it was so soft , and not in a good way, a beer glass would have given better results. It was useable with smaller apertures and as a result of its poor quality, the flare was lovely. When I bought the D800 the 36mpx was way too much for it to handle so now I have top quality Nikkor glass and getting flare is harder, some gentle Photoshopping can help too though.
Shooting in the shade can give you low light conditions even in the early part of the autumn, late summer, so you either crank up the iso, use fast lenses, use vibration reduction (VR) on Nikon image stabilisation or as I do a combmation of all three, or use flash.
I have tried using a small handheld flash as a fill-in light or using bigger battery powered studio lights but personally I just don’t like the “look” that they give for this type of shoot. Maybe I will use a reflector just to fill in the shadows a bit but that is all.
Just be careful not to confuse camera shake with blur caused by the subject moving. Nikon’s VR system is superb and it keeps getting better although the newer lenses seem to have more buttons on them to control the VR than my first proper camera did.
