Welcome to the new Real World Art Blog

When taking a photograph it is rarely just a case of pointing the camera and clicking a button.

The first problem if photographing people or animals is your subject: they're never facing the way you want them to!

With people, the solution is easy - you just tell them where to stand and which way to face and generally they will oblige. Animals on the other hand will refuse to follow direction, so it's a case of moving your camera into the correct position and waiting patiently for them to do something 'cute'.

The next problem is the lighting. If you are indoors and have access to lights and electricity this isn't a problem at all, but outdoors the English weather has a habit of changing just when you've got your camera settings in place and your test shots done.

The direction of light is also a problem: you can't move a mountain to get the sun in front, so again, it's a case of finding somewhere comfortable to sit and waiting.

Sometimes what you want to photograph is marred by crowds of people, vehicles or other items cluttering up the view, but you can take multiple shots of the same scene as people move and hope you can stitch something together when you get back home.

Once back home and in front of the computer it's then quite a few hours choosing the best shots, correcting for any exposure 'hiccups', removing stray tourists to (mostly) get a few photographs that would look good printed out and displayed.

There's many other things that can happen on a photo shoot, and this Blog will detail some of them, as well as giving tips where I can on how best to deal with them.