‘People and Places’ course at West Dean – the last entry

By alan frost on October 26, 2012

Back in the Summer I attended an excellent photography course at West Dean College in Sussex – People and Places with Jacqui Hurst. It now seems like a long time ago, so I ought to wrap it up with one last and very overdue entry. The two previous posts realting to this course can be found by clicking on these links – Glorious Goodwood and Littlehampton Seafront.

I have mentioned it before but at the beginning of the course all the participants were asked what they wanted to get out of the week. My reply was quite simply to see in ‘black and white’ and to produce a selection of images all in monochrome. I was certainly true to my word as the images below and on the two previous posts will testify.

Since the course I have almost exclusively shot black and white. My starting point is to shoot in RAW and then convert to Black and White. I did go through a short period when I set the camera to shoot RAW and a B&W jpeg, but this just filled up space on my hard drive. There were more photos to sort and delete, which I am not that good at doing in the first place.

If the shot is poorly composed, not a good subject or the lighting is poor…..I could go on; then whether or not it’s in colour or black and white is not going to make that much difference. In my view I should still be htting the delete key and only processing something which is really worth the time and effort of looking at a computer screen.

I did not take my DSLR on the course, so all the photographs were taken using the Olympus OMD EM5 and a variety of prime lenses. Although I had only purchased the camera a week or two before the course, by the end of the week I was reasonably familiar with its functions and menu systems. Some reviews have said the menu system is quite complicated and not that intuitive. I cant agree, with a little time the camera settings can readily be changed to whatever suits your style.

The trombone clown
Olympus OMD EM5 12-50mm @ 26mm f5.2 1/160 ISO 1600