Harry's Blog

I do believe I'm finally getting the hang of this photography lark.

I'm certainly happier with the pictures that I've taken over recent weeks than any I've taken before.

The big change I think is decided how I want to take pictures rather than worrying how my camera seems to want to take them, or how I should use it. The camera is just a tool rather than the arbiter of what makes a good photograph.

And so I've spent the weekend with the camera mostly on manual mode snapping pictures of a beautiful family garden in Dorset and captured some lovely portraits of our children.

I've developed my own favoured style of using manual mode and the spot meter to expose as far to the right as I can without blowing highlights. And I'm aided by setting the camera to use a faithful picture style and contrast and saturation at zero.

As I'm shooting RAW these are changed later, the reason I'm using these settings for shooting is they give a more accurate histogram display to aid in making the best use of the camera's dynamic range.

I seem to have sussed how to use external flash the same weekend I clicked with a personal way of manually exposing my pictures.

For low light pictures I switched to manually exposing and lighting my subjects entirely with teh flash. It seems to have paid off.

And to celebrate I've installed a new photo gallery here on the website.

So from now on my latest pictures will appear here on http://gallery.harryneary.com. Please do bookmark it or subscribe to the feed on that page.