So last Sunday saw some of us WeBloggers come together for an awesome blog photography workshop, hosted by the wonderful Georgie Glass.
Georgie is a professional photographer, specialising in food photography and her clients include many of the wonderful restaurants in Manchester, as well as Manchester Confidential. Basically, she's bad ass at taking photos! She, alongside her friend Kate, has also recently started a blog, Ginseng & Thyme, which instantly gave us all photo-lust and envy (we're happy for you really Georgie!).
We all want our blog photography to be the best it can be and strive to get those enviable instagrammable images don't we? And we all have equipment like DSLRs that we don't really know how to use, don't we? Well, Georgie led a 5 hour workshop that taught us how to get off auto and finally achieve the sorts of photos we can be proud of...
Blog Photography Workshop
We met at Barton Arcade at the Six and Flow offices (Manchester-based inbound marketing agency), which has fast become our resident event space - have you seen how awesome that place is? The arcade itself is just stunning and is a dream location for any blogger or instagrammer...amazing natural light and lots of unique features.
After a quick intro from Georgie and Holly, we headed down to the popular PKB, (again an instagram paradise!) for lattes and a go at taking some lifestyle blog photography and flat-lays. This was a great exercise as we got to meet our fellow bloggers and photographers, get to know eachother a bit and have fun taking some snaps.
This exercise in blog photography also threw up some of the issues that we all face when using our DSLRs, or even phones...things like:
-
how to achieve that shallow depth of field and romantic blurry background
-
how to get a decent flat-lay without shadow
-
how to avoid awful yellow light
-
how to shoot in changing light conditions or darker interiors
-
how to shoot through glass
-
how to get a unique shot or composition to your photograph
So with those issues fresh in mind, we went back up to discuss them and delve a bit more into the technical side of blog photography and using our cameras.
This was a great opportunity to ask a professional photographer about her tricks of the trades and the essentials in her kit bag. We also got advice in layman's terms that we could immediately put into practice.
Following a scrummy picnic lunch, we quickly got onto the final session of the day, which was another blog photography shoot - this time focused more on lifestyle and the things around us. Now we could really experiment with shooting in manual mode and having more confidence from the morning's sessions.
Some of us partnered-up and decided to shoot each other, (I mean not all of us have photographer boyfriends do we?) and some ventured off to photograph their awesome surroundings and some others decided to style more flat-lays and compose some interesting shots.
We came back together for a final chat and to talk-through our findings and all the exciting things that we had planned for our blogs.
It was such a success that we can't wait to host another and have lots of ideas for spin-off workshops too, based around blog photography.
Want to be at the next one?
So if you're interested, don't forget to subscribe to WeBlogMCR so that you're the first to hear about our events and so that you receive discounted tickets too!
We'll be sure to host another blog photography workshop, and we've got lots of other amazing events planned for the year (including the Northern Blog Awards!!).
