Wow! That one word pretty much sums up my reaction to last Wednesday’s presentation.  I could tell we were in for a good evening when our guest speaker – Ruth Grindrod – began her presentation with a quick overview of all the awards and accolades that she has won, and boy did the evening not disappoint!

For me, Ruth’s presentation was the perfect blend of fantastic images, useful hints and tips on technique, some insightful technical information, and a great overview of the type of kit that Ruth uses to capture her stunning images.

Speaking of kit, Ruth commented on how she doesn’t subscribe to the idea that you need the latest and greatest kit in order to take good pictures .. a philosophy that she happily puts into practice by choosing not to use Canon equipment (Ruth is a friend of Nikon, but she was so lovely I won’t hold that against her)! 

Aside from her two camera bodies of choice, Ruth uses a relatively small selection of lenses including a 24-70mm, a 70-200mm, a 80-400mm, and a macro lens. Ruth also makes extensive use of grads and ND filters, typically to help balance the contrast between brighter skies and darker foregrounds, as well as for slowing movement in e.g. water.  For full details of her equipment (and for another opportunity to enjoy her great work), do check out her website here:

https://www.ruthgrindrodlandscapephotography.co.uk/about

I was also very much taken by Ruth’s general attitude to photography. As she explained, for her photography should all be about the fun of taking pictures and the emotions that our images evoke in others .. photography should also be something for all of us to enjoy rather than just those that are fit and able to climb (and then hang off the side of?) a mountain! Very well said indeed! Ruth’s view was that at the end of the day we each need to discover what we like to take pictures of and what we want people to take away from our work.

I’m sure it was music to most member’s ears when Ruth said that guiding principles should be viewed as just that .. a guide! They are not rules that are set in stone, so if you like something but it doesn’t conform to those guiding principles, go for it anyway and take the shot!

Another good piece of advice that (as someone who is 6’4 tall!) I find myself constantly having to remind myself of, is that sometimes it pays to look down .. the most interesting pictures are sometimes found at your feet rather than in those far-off vistas.

Another interesting tip Ruth shared was to consider changing the aspect ratio in your camera rather than cropping in post-production .. Ruth takes a lot of 1:1 aspect ratio pictures so sets her camera up so that she can see what she is taking in-camera rather than cropping in post-production.  An interesting idea that I had never really considered before.

Members that joined the zoom event will already have their own opinions on what they thought of Ruth’s work (and anyone that missed the evening can see her full portfolio on her web-site) so I wont give a blow-by-blow narrative on what we enjoyed on Wednesday.  Suffice to say that for me, Ruth’s images were simply fantastic: I have personal a love of water, ice and landscapes, so Ruth’s portfolio ticked all of those boxes (and more) absolutely perfectly!

As I mentioned at the start of the blog, Ruth’s presentation not only contained a fabulous portfolio of stunning images, but also many useful tips and hints.  Some that particularly resonated with me included:

• Work out in advance what you think you are going to try and shoot as that will help inform the equipment that you might need e.g. to take a tripod or not 😊
• Don’t be frightened to crank up the ISO, especially if you find yourself in a vibrating small plane trying to take pin-sharp landscape shots over Iceland!
• When taking woodland shots it is often difficult to get full trees in the shot.  Instead, consider what interesting shapes you might home-in on and make that the subject of your image.
• Snow confuses camera sensors, so take your shot and then take 3-4 more shots each at a 1/3 stop increase to avoid dirty snow (one of those pics will be good!).
• It’s always better to slightly under-expose (correctly expose for the highlights) as you can always bring out the shadows in post-production (whereas you cannot easily fix blown highlights).
• Ruth’s go-to ND filters are 0.6, 1.2, and 1.8 (occasionally 2.8 and 3) .. she doesn’t tend to use the stronger ones as they are only for very long exposures and she often only want to soften movement subtly.
• In this day and age of Instagram where most people think any picture dripping with over-saturated colour is a great picture, don’t get seduced by colour! If the composition doesn’t work in monochrome, no amount of colur will turn it into a great image!  
• Ensure vibration reduction is witched ON if shooting hand-held, but OFF if using a tripod / taking a long exposure images.
• When processing, take a break and come back to the image with a fresh eye .. if you do this you will see things that you didn’t see before and the end result will be all the better for it.
• And finally (and maybe controversially for a photography blog) Ruth urged us all to ensure we enjoy with our eyes and not always through the camera!

Ruth’s demo on post-processing left me wanting to go back and re-process all of my images!  Watching her quickly take a relatively uninspiring image and turn it into something that I would happily have hanging on my wall at home was inspiring and depressing in equal measure!  Clearly Ruth had the end-result in mind when she took the raw image, but with relatively few clicks of the mouse and slides of sliders, she produced yet another great picture.  Quite amazing 😊

Anway, I leave you with a few examples of Ruth’s work that she has kindly given permission for me to share with you in this blog.  I strongly urge you to go look at her very extensive portfolio on her website .. it’s all rather special and it’s guaranteed to make you utter that “Wow” word too!

Author: Mark B