Today’s post is a listing of things that we frequently missed or forgot, subconsciously and consciously.

The aim is to avoid “…I should have…” or “I wish I had…” moments.

1. Dark Faces

This happens when the light source eg. the sun is behind your subject. This kind of mistake happens all the time even to someone who has taken a lot of photographs (less frequent though).

Example:

One way to fix this is by using a flash or a reflector or set the camera to centre weight metering.

The rule of thumb: “If the shadow leans towards you, use your flash or a reflector or set to centre-weight metering”

2. Missing Feet

So you’re on a trip and pretty excited with the things surrounds you. You take a snap of your trip group and by the time you came home you noticed something isn’t right… Their feet were cropped out!!

Example:

Maybe not everyone noticed this, but having the feet cropped out is a very common annoying mistake and many times a photo that should be great in the living room is lost.

3. Slanted Horizon

Sunset on the sea (or a storm cloud in this example) is always a great view to snap. However we have to take care that we don’t tilt our camera a tad bit. The horizon is very sensitive to angle and can be very annoying when slanted. Look at the picture below:

Slanted horizon gives an unsteady feeling, to address this, turn on your guide lines in the camera viewfinder.

4. Forgotten Manual Focus

The title speaks for itself. There was one time when I got a batch of blurred image because I had forgotten to turn my auto focus back on. The LCD preview will not do any justice since most image looks clear in there, however once viewed on your computer screen, great disappointment awaits.

5. Lazy to Take Another Shot

If you feel your shot is not up to scratch, shoot again. Trust me, there are many things that photoshop cannot fix; and you only know this after you got home!

That’s a starter list, there are many more common mistakes that we do, however above are the ones I felt most frequently happen.

Last night I had the Golden Key Career Workshop running, which I have organized quite a while ago. The speakers were great, Joe Corrigan and Jon Yeo talked about the importance of setting yourself above others in order to secure a better career.

Personally I’m quite pleased with the materials covered here and I am also pleased to hear the audiences find that the workshop was useful (from the conversation with different people). In the beginning I was quite worried about the turnout rate: I kept thinking whether this lecture theater gonna end up empty.

The turnout rate turns out to be great!! The theater was quite crowded and people were listening intently to the presentations.

As Joe and Jon moves towards the meat of the presentation, I could see that people are getting more and more interested. This workshop’s materials were very different from the standard job seeking advices. It wasn’t just about resume and cover letter, it was about our attitude and habit. It was about improving ourselves to overcome fear in trying something new, learn top make mistake and learn to accept or hear bad responses.

I believe this kind of workshop can alleviate Golden Key RMIT into a more professional level and help giving back to its members as well as the student community.

This was a great presentation and in the future, this kind of workshop is not to be missed. I’m planning to hold another professional workshop in the future, the topic will depends on the interest of the community.

More Pictures

Photography Takeaway

Right, you might think that this kind of workshop have nothing to do with photography? Well there are a few things that we can takeaway from attending this kind of workshop (and taking photos):

1. You learn how to build up your skills to get a good job in photography
2. You get to practice your indoor photography skills. The images in this post are taken without flash, the requirement is to use a fast lens and high ISO. The fastest lens that I have is my trusty Tamron f/2.8, it does the job wonderfully. Open up the aperture to the max and ISO as high as possible, you’ll get a sharp shot.
3. If you don’t have a fast lens, then bring a powerful flash such as Nikon SB-600 or Nikon SB-800

More workshop images can be seen at http://www.goldenkey-rmit.org.

BenchmarkEdu can be found in: http://benchmarkedu.blogspot.com/

The Melbourne Motor Show, always a good place to admire cool and interesting cars…and of course, taking photographs of them.

One of the thing that interests me a lot is that many of the concept cars in there are hybrid cars. I guess most of the car manufacturers are going green due to the global movement towards “less carbon emission”… anyway, this is a photography blog so I’m not gonna to the whole environmental discussion

A spark of different addition is the participation of Bolwell, the Australian “Ferrari”. Nice looking car with a smaller engine than most of the exotic cars.

Other sport cars includes the new Hyundai Genesis Coupe, Ford and of course other familiar players like Ferrari.

Star of the Show

Located in a modest corner of the exhibition without is the promoted star of the show, the Bugatti Veyron. This fastest car in the world stopped only for 3 days, which no doubt attracted some of the crowd to visit the exhibition sooner. Deviating into photography topic a bit, notice that I take a picture of the information board in order to tell the story through the picture.

The Veyron is not the only star as far as I can see. I think the car on the left, the Lexus LS600hs is much more interesting. Its ability to automate parking procedure is quite an advancement in the car industry. Notice on the left that the lady didn’t even touch the steering wheel while the car is parking. I was at the right place and time to take a quick snap when the demonstration happened :D.

The Other…

The motorbike on the left is considered the “other”, I have no other words. Standing tall like a monster truck this motorbike is the biggest motorbike in the world. Apparently this motorbike is being used in destruction shows, where it flattened different normal cars.

Interesting addition to the show. Anyway, it was pretty hard to get a whole shot of this thing due to its size although I was using an 17mm lens.

It was great going to the car show, it is very interesting to see the technologies out there.

Photography Take Away

By going to shows like this one, there are a couple points that we can learn from photography stand point.

1. Be on the lookout for interesting demonstration.
2. Be patient when photographing, there are hundreds of people in the arena and they will most likely walk in front of you.
3. Take your time, don’t be hasty, there are plenty to look at. Refrain from going home in the first 30-60 minutes. This is important as demonstrations are done on particular times only.
4. Look at the exhibition booklet in order to properly understand the arena.