Lights Camera Currys blogger event

Hiya lovelies,

Recently I was contacted by Shaun from Joe Blogs who invited me along to a photography masterclass in Brighton hosted by Currys PC World. Our teacher for the day was professional photographer Dade Freeman, who was really relatable, and funny as well, which always helps. The goal of the day was to gain confidence in using the manual setting on our cameras, where you control the ISO, aperture and shutter speed yourself.

When I got my first DSLR 5-6 years ago, I often used manual but I've got out of the habit of using it. I learned a lot of new things from Dade's advice. We had a lovely lunch and then went out to practice our new knowledge.

Brain food?

Click on photos to enlarge.

Dade giving some advice

I was really pleased that Dade's advice helped me understand my camera better. Here are a bunch of my favourite shots taken on manual. There are many - I was so thrilled to have taken better photos than usual. We had several aims to complete on our photo walk. They were capture leading lines, frame your shot, use shallow depth of field, capture motion at low speed, photographic symmetry and freeze fast action. I didn't do justice to them all - the heat, all the people milling about and Fibro fog made for total brain freeze. I also took some general 'Yay, Brighton!' photos.

Freezing fast speed
Playing with focus
A play on leading lines
The remains of the West Pier using shallow depth of field
Photographic symmetry
I took this through a bin as one of our aims was 'frame your shot'.
Dade also encouraged us to use negative space.
This was a capture movement at slow speed FAIL

As well as learning how to use my camera better, I met a lot of lovely ladies. I was totally bricking it beforehand, but once I was inside and talking to people I was fine. I sat between Margot and Kyleigh.

When we went out to take photos I threw myself into it then headed back to the carousel where I was expecting to see everyone else. I could only see Kyleigh and Ellie there, so we waited for everyone else to turn up. I'm still not sure what happened, but we lost everyone else. We waited ages then went back to the media centre where the event was held. Sadly we missed out on the group photo, but here's everyone who made it.


The first and last photos belong to the organisers. You can read all about the day's events on the Currys blog.

Also check out Kyleigh's and Margot's posts about the day.

Thanks for inviting me, I had fun!

P.S. I was terrified before the event that I'd get all the way to Brighton and realise I'd forgotten my camera. Can you imagine?!

No comments