“Beautiful photos, you must have a great camera!”
This is the inevitable sentence that I, as a photographer, often hear. And it’s true; I do have a great camera. And being a professional DSLR camera that has spent years studying photography, practising at every opportunity to improve its skills and develop an eye for a great shot, it can produce some superb photos;
But it certainly makes its owner work hard.
When my camera wants to take some great photos, it wakes me up one or more hours before dawn and makes me drive all the way to a location that it had previously made me drive and walk around several times, just so it could study the area and find the best point of view from which to photograph it. The camera then proceeds to make me wait around in the freezing cold for the right light and conditions to appear as the dawn breaks and sun rises.
My camera works me hard
Each time the camera forces me to spend time setting it up on the tripod, fiddling with the legs and head adjustments while also setting the focal length, in order to find the right composition. It then tells me how to set the aperture, shutter speed and ISO, so I will achieve the perfect exposure. It also tells me which filters to use, if necessary. Should the perfect conditions not appear on this particular morning, the camera graciously allows me to return home for breakfast. The whole process is repeated on other days until those perfect conditions appear and it manages to get just the right photo that it had in mind. And when that magic moment happens it tells me the exact time to press that shutter button.
And if that isn’t enough, it also cunningly plans to force me to return to the same location at different times of the year and in different weather, so it can get a variety of pictures.
And that’s not all:
After a successful shoot, back home the camera has me connect it to the computer and sit and wait while it spends hours editing and processing the images from its shoot, zooms and scans each image for dust spots, before uploading to all the photo agencies and its own website.
During the day, the camera continually makes me spend hours studying maps, moon and sun rise and set times at different times of the year and then drive around in search of these many different locations looking for the best viewpoints. All this so it can plan future morning or evening photo shoots. Sometimes the camera spends my money travelling all over the country or around other countries to get great photos.
But as you can see by the photos, it’s a great camera. Of course, one like this doesn’t come cheap. So if you would like to hire my camera for the day (along with its very tired owner), or buy one its photos, then please look at my websites for prices:
How to photograph St Thomas Church view
St Thomas Church (Sveti Tomaž nad Praprotnim) in the hills of Northern Slovenia is an iconic view. In this article I’m going to give you some tips on how, when and from where to photograph it.
Working with Natural Light in Photography
I took this photo on an August morning from Zaosiri Beach on Lošinj Island during a second trip to this location. I had found this fantastic place the year before purely by chance. While the view of these islands had interested me, it was not the image that I’d envisaged at the time.
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