So if you are organising a conference, a Ball, a dance, a New Years Eve party, an office party then please get in touch and ask about our rates, we start a very simple 2 hour booking, but can incorporate any hours, event and pretty much any location. Its a great way to get staff, your team, guests involved in the night, plus we offer increased traffic to your site with gallery hosting of the images, and prints available on the night (this service must be booked in advance).

Heavy Artillery Private View

Beyond Retro Brighton store Launch

Brighton Freshers Ball

GangUp Magazine Launch

Brighton Pride 2009

Fight Night in Hove

Beyond experimentation and practice, image reviewing and criticism there are a fair few technical aspects that if considered right from the start may avoid some of the irritation and pain that can occur. Try not to have a “what’s wrong with my camera, pictures, and files” moment.

10. Your camera is not important.

Your camera body isn’t the most important part of you kit, it is hard to resist the next model in the range, the one with more features the one that promises more pixels, better pictures, but your lens has the most influence on image quality. If you are still using the cheap kit lens that came with your body it is time to do some research and consider what you need your lens to do.

DSLR’s are designed to take interchangeable lenses, although opening your wallet may seem like a scary thought, a good lens will allow you to shoot in different situations and conditions and give more control over your photography.

It doesn’t even need to be that heavy on the finances; cheaper plastic prime lenses are available and can allow you f-stops that will change your photography.

9. Don’t expect Auto Focus to read your mind,

Controlling the emphasis of you photography and keeping the important features in your shot is important.

Auto focus automatically does this for you; well auto focus will focus on something, or more accurately anything but normally that is the object right in the centre of your frame. Cameras have no idea what your chosen subject is or where it is in the frame, as a photographer selecting the correct auto focus point for each shot is important so make sure that it is you making the choice and not the camera.

8. Don’t downgrade your camera

You paid enough for your new equipment, why would you decide to only use half of it. Most DSLR’s come with around a 1000 resolution settings well it seems like that when you go into the menus.

The resolution of the camera is usually a key selling point for any camera so when you select a setting below the full capacity you may as well have bought a cheaper camera. Shoot the largest file you can.

Shoot RAW and enjoy the benefits it has to offer.

7. &  6 Respect your memory cards, don’t respect your LCD screen

Memory cards work hard remembering all your shots, they remember the good and the bad ones and this is hugely valuable to learners. Being able to see why bad shots fail is as useful as seeing why great shots work.

A good habit to get into to after each series of shots is to download them all to your computer then place the card back into the camera to format it after each download. Get out of the habit of culling images on your memory card before you have viewed them full size on a computer. It is very hard to make a judgment on a 3” LCD screen, and also your memory card will reward you for keeping its memory system in order. Deleting files out of sequence and not using the camera to format it each time will eventually end in a corruption precisely when you need it least.

A 3” version of the image you have just shot is a very tricky way to judge an image, it can allow you a good idea whether the overall composition works and whether highlights are blown or whether you have the correct exposure or not, but it is very easy to miss important details. Always zoom into your image to check that you have the image you need, are everyone’s eyes open ? where is the focus ? is the image sharp ? did you hold the camera still on that long exposure.

5. Read the manual, no really read the manual

A massive trait of mine is to take it out the box, fiddle with it, get the battery in it, fiddle some more, and say “I know how it works”. In fact I feel that I can master most electrical equipment, toys, gadgets within 30 seconds of getting them in my grubby hands. Wrong!!

Cameras need to be understood, read the manual, understand what each button does, otherwise the chances are that you will find that you are missing easy ways to make your shooting quicker easier. This will leave you more time to frame and compose your images.

4. Your camera isn’t a 35mm SLR

If you stand in exactly the same spot and frame the same shot with the same lens a digital SLR will capture less of the scene than a film SLR.

The reason being that digital sensors are not the same size as original 35mm film and the digital sensor area is recording is a cropped part of the scene. This cropping means you either need to step further back or change your lens. The factor at which this cropping happens alters with each different manufacturer. With Canon the cropping factor is 1.6 meaning your 50mm lens actually ends up being an 80mm lens (50mm x 1.6 =80mm) Although this can be useful when buying a telephoto lens as your crop factor may mean the 80-200mm lens you are buying is actually 128-320mm, it is good to remember especially when you are shooting at shorter focal length a 28mm lens on a DSLR is not a wide angle lens.

Crop factors are important to all DSLR users unless you have enough money to treat yourself to a full frame model.

3. WorkFlow

Right from when you first start taking digital images it important to put in place a workflow and storage system. This system should include backing up files, keeping an unedited “negative” raw file of all your images hopefully linked or in the same place as your edited final version, downloading images and formatting cards.

Making sure that you have a system for these things will reward you when, as has happened to every photographer at some point, a hard drive fails, or a memory card is changed and the images haven’t been formatted. If you have a system in place you won’t have a “Help, have I downloaded these” moment.

2. Sharpen

If you are printing your own work or supplying your images for printed material, sharpening is of huge importance.

You want your images to look as good they do on the screen if not better and if you don’t sharpen you will never achieve this. There are various ways of doing it and it a little experimentation will allow you to achieve far better prints.

1. Calibrate

Every screen displays an image differently; if you have never calibrated your monitor you have no idea what you images looks like.

When you have brought a shot into photoshop tweaked it and are happy with the results, if you have not calibrated your monitor, you may have created something that may look bizarre when printed or displayed on a calibrated screen.

Calibration devices are simple to use and fairly cheap and even better can be shared between friends or even between people you don’t like very much. They will mean you can have confidence in the images that you are producing.

Matt.

If you had no idea that this was going on, and stepped of a train at Brighton Station around 3pm on Saturday 31st October, you would have got a very big fright!!!!

As expected a load of photographers turned up to shoot the event, and Garage Studios very own Adam ‘The Brownhorse’ Bronkhorst was in town that day, and just happened to have a camera on him. Actually he had two. One was his trusty little point and shoot film camera and the other was a Diana Camera loaded with Medium Format Slide Film, to be cross processed. While most photographers there had their big DSLR’s with them, Adam ran around with his little basic film cameras fired off a few rolls of film.

Below are some of the results from the film cameras. You can see the shots from the Diana at the end, and we think they have an eerie feel to them. It just goes to show that the best camera you can have is the one thats on you at all times. Hope you enjoy the shots.

Yep thats right, you can now see all of the photographs from the Heavy Artillery ‘Haters’ show, pop up studio.

all you have to do is click this link:

http://garage-studios.co.uk/u/1

Its as simple as that.

Oh and we’ll post some pictures when its done so you can see how grand and swish it all looks.

Thats all, GS crew.

Heavy Artillery’s Haters Show from Garage Studios on Vimeo.

Last night we took the pop up studio down to the Heavy Artillery Crew’s new art exhibition called Haters at the Prescription Art Gallery in Brighton.

Thanks to all those who made it happen, the HA crew for being so welcoming, Mary & Dave for being the best assistants / clip board girl and everyone we took a photo off.

Here is the video of the shots and they will all be up on the site next week some time, so watch this space.

There was a fantastic turn out and the place was packed with people bargain hunting and admiring the cameras on sale. There was everything from the latest top of the range Canon Digital lenses to large format big wooden boxes that the photographer has to hide under a cloth to shoot and every thing, and we mean everything in between.

The fair was part organised by Paul from Clock Tower Cameras and he told us that the fair was such a success that they are planning on running a few next year as well. So watch this space as we’ll keep you posted when we know more.

Here are a few snaps from the day to give you an idea of what it was like:

Beyond Retro Pop Up Studio from Garage Studios on Vimeo.

Last night we took the Garage Studios pop up studio down to the Beyond Retro Launch in Brighton to photograph all the fashionistas. Beyond Retro is a new fashion shop / warehouse that sells vintage and retro clothing that has just opened up down our street. The place is so big and packed full of fantastic gear.

If you want to see the images from the night click the link below.

CLICK HERE TO LOOK AT THE IMAGES

So here they are all the portraits, group shots and madness from last Friday nights Brighton Fresher’s Ball  at the Brighton Centre. The Garage Studios pop-up studio again getting great shots from one of Brighton’s events. The Fresher’s ball and all of USSU and UBSU students looking great and fitting into the sets now from GangUp, Pride, Fight Night.

garage-studios.co.uk/brighton-freshers-ball-photos

If you would like to get hi-res print or copy of the file please get in contact here and send us the URL of your image.

Garage Studios at Brighton Freshers Ball from Garage Studios on Vimeo.