Use both hands!

On this bone-chillingly cold day I went to Kew Gardens with the photographer Paul Debois. He’d kindly agreed to give me some expert tuition on how to use my camera so that I can take better pictures for this blog. Poor Paul probably wasn’t banking on getting hypothermia or on giving rudimentary instructions (‘use both hands!!’) with alarming regularity but he put a brave face on it and gave me lots of great advice. I learnt loads, including:

1) Use both hands when taking a pic (duh)

2) MOVE AROUND a lot to find the right angle

3) Shooting from a low angle is often best

4) Tilt the camera up (sky is more interesting than paving)

5) Don’t be afraid of the manual settings

6) You have to make the camera see what the eye sees

7) A homemade reflector (cardboard covered with tin foil) can work wonders

8) My camera has its limitations – I’m never going to take shots with a lovely blurry background

9) I wish I had a better camera.

Here are some of the shots we took. Paul runs occasional garden photography workshops with Jason Ingram for the Royal Photographic Society – the next one is on 4 and 5 June.