When I started blogging six years ago, I was held back by being unable to take photos of myself. I had tried with a tripod and remote timer but I absolutely sucked at it. I could learn and grow with other types of photography, this one escaped me. So I resolved to learn well enough to teach other people that were willing to help me out.
The other people that I got involved were my mum and my sister because both were keen to give me a hand. It was a frustrating start. I didn’t know what I needed to ask them. They didn’t know what I needed. I didn’t know what common mistakes to look out for. With effort and growth and trying again and again I got better at it and as a result, so did they. Blog shoots back then were stressful in a way that I can laugh about now. At the time I took it very seriously.
In more recent days, I have also started getting into video. This is mostly fine but when I did a shoot with my mum and my sister for these photos, I noted afterwards how adding in the complication of video as well meant that now the shoots had started to feel like they had way back then when we were all stressed and things weren’t coming together easily.
This shoot was hard for a collective of reasons, one is that my camera struggles to focus when light is heading directly down the lens. The way a round this is a manual process of covering the light with one hand while focusing with the other. It requires about four precise movements and hand and arm strength. Because I wanted the light heading directly down the lens the skill to shoot was then a bit above the level of coaching I can usually do. I’m often happy with ‘near enough is good enough’ photos. The most common flaw that I’ll have in a photo when coaching someone is that the focus is off. This is usually passable to the eye of non-photographers but this shoot is one of those times that it’s very noticeable. In this instance it was made worse by another fault that seems to happen when I pass people my camera: the aperture dial gets bumped until the camera settings are for photographing tiny details on flowers or bugs, not people and landscapes. That happened in this instance and those things together meant all else suffered.
I think the pictures do hold their own charm and beauty even if they are off with the technicalities. I wanted to do a picnic with blue skies and long summer grass. The horses were a sweet surprise.
I don’t know how we’re going to navigate photos and video in the future. It’s really challenging to coach two people at once. Will we ever get good at it? It didn’t feel like it when I first started doing just photography, so we shall see if it gets easier. The one place I feel like my coaching and communication skills get to grow is during a photo shoot, that’s for sure.
The photos here with my sister and me in them were taken by my mum. The ones with my sister or just the horses were taken by me. Ones with just me were taken by my sister. It was quite a family affair. My sister will be putting up a blog post soon too.
The yellow dress: an old ASOS goodie.
– L
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