It was the first time, I’d been able to attend a photo meetup. The class was made up of pros and enthusiasts, so it was cool to see some of the gear the pros were carrying around. After about an hour class, we started taking photos of a local area model. The weather was nice, but we had a slight overcast, so I really didn’t get to practice taking outdoor portraits in direct sunlight. It was good that we were able to practice right after the class, because the information was still fresh in our heads.

I used my Nikkor 50mm 1.8 and the Nikkor 55-200mm for the photos below. I shot in RAW which came in handy because the original version second photo was extremely overblown. I tried a couple of things to save it and came out with the high contrast black and white.

Overall, I have to say I’m pleased with the results. It gives me a little confidence to go out and find more people (other than my kids) to photograph. As time permits, I’ll definitely be going to other meetups and will post the photos here.

Despite a few little meltdowns and a fire ant attack, he did good. But most importantly, he had fun.

Taking indoor, low light photos is always a challenge when you don’t have a good lens, so most of the pictures were doctored up a little. I didn’t break out my external flash, so I used the on-camera one which had to be toned down some in post processing. I also found auto focusing was an issue at times, but the Nikon did pretty good with picking out the right settings in Priority mode.

Here’s the original post I did about the event at theotalks.net.

Here are some pictures from that night. I didn’t have a flash at the time, so I had to post-process a lot of these to make them brighter.

What I liked was that she WANTED people to take pictures. She invited people on the floor to come down while she posed. We were on the left side of the stage in the first couple of rows, so I used my 50-200mm lens. It was dark and I didn’t have a flash at the time, but I managed to get some decent shots.