Insect Photography / Gardens at Lake Merritt
/
Point and shoot, DSLR and even cell phone photographers spent the morning learning how to use their cameras to get great insect photographs. Eddie Dunbar of the Insect Sciences Museum of California helped participants find and identify insects, while local photographer Damon Tighe helped participants with how to navigate the settings on their cameras in addition to pointers on composition. A little bit of time was spent learning how to use flashes in the field and how determine which lens, aperture, shutter speed and ISO would work best with insect subjects.
Two composition rules were covered to get everyone started thinking about where to put their insect subjects and how to use the background plants etc in a way that encourage a viewer to spend more time looking at the image. When presented with a rectangle, the human eye tends to go right tot he center, so if you put your subject just outside of the center you've now just bought a little more time with your viewer. If you can find a line that runs from one corner of the image to the far corner you can trick the viewer's eye into following that line all the way across the image, this is known as an S-curve. Below are quick references for these two composition rules:
Keep an eye our for more photography workshops through CCNH and if you have a subject you'd really like us to cover, please Contact us or leave a note in the comments below!