Playing with the camera!

I've always enjoyed taking photo's and felt quite a bit of satisfaction when taking a picture that appeared to capture the moment or subject in a special way. I've been aware of trying to make the best use of light and camera angles but within the bounds of an automatic point and shoot.

When I've used my 'big' camera (a 5 year old Canon DSLR) I've mostly used its automatic settings and when venturing outside the 'green square' into the manual modes, it's been largely stepping into the unknown where any resulting good photo's have been more like happy accidents than a result of knowledge based skills.

Never even having made the time to sit down and read the handbook properly, I barely knew what most of the buttons and dials did. So, when I received the offer of a good deal on a 3-hour course in getting to know my camera, I decided this was the time!

Thanks to the Rose Studio in Southsea, I spent a fun afternoon this week with a lovely class, boggling my brain with shutter speeds, apertures, ISO's and experimenting with all those buttons and dials. By the end of it, although we'd barely scratched the surface, we were all eager to be getting out there and playing with our toys!

Today, my son and I were on a train coming back from Southampton where we'd been looking at an exhibition of paintings and photographs by surrealist artists in Southampton Art Gallery:
 

The Road is Wider than Long: Roland Penrose and British SurrealismUntil 13 May 2012
Galleries 5-8

"This exhibition explores the weird and wonderful world of Roland Penrose and British Surrealism. The show looks at British Surrealism from its origins to the present day and brings together over one hundred significant artworks.
Image credit: Roland Penrose Night and Day (oil on canvas) 1937 © Roland Penrose Estate, England 2011. All rights reserved". ~ From Art Gallery publicity.

We decided to do a bit of experimentation with my camera which made the journey home a lot of fun and presented us with the opportunity for our own bit of surrealism! Here are a few of the results:

My son loves magic tricks and enjoyed the way that we could turn him into a ghost, make him almost invisible or give him two heads so he could look in two directions at once - and the 'magic' was all the more exciting because it could all happen without the help of Photoshop!

We got off the train just as the sun was setting and couldn't resist taking one last photo...