How time flies! It feels like only five minutes ago, I was taking pictures of a baby Thomas in the swimming pool.
But a few years have passed and now, he is grabbing his first SLR himself! Obviously, with the current COVID-19 restrictions in place, we haven’t been able to leave the house much. But we have managed to have a couple of walks around the block. Thomas even asked to get-up extra early one morning in order to take photos while the sun was low. This had the double advantage of giving us better lighting conditions and less people walking around.
We walked for about 45 minutes and, while I often pointed at subject ideas, he enjoyed trying to compose interesting shots. He also started paying attention to the sun’s position to avoid taking a picture of his own shadow! For now, he is using the camera on full automatic while learning to compose a good image. He is starting to understand depth of field and where to focus, but I think we’ll wait a bit before we start introducing the concepts of speed and aperture.
After our walk, we reviewed the images together and he was quite critical of his own work, pointing out what could have been done better and where an image could have been enhanced. We cropped them together in Lightroom and applied minimal retouching and colour correction.
And here’s the result of his first attempt. That was a proud daddy moment!
St Mary’s island statue 
St Mary’s island statue 
St Mary’s island statue 
Thomas was keen to get a photo of the moon 
The river Medway 
St Mary’s island slipway at dawn 
The fishing village 
The beauty and the sting 
Blossom in the garden 
The garden in spring