The Wales Millennium Centre, opened in 2004 and the Pierhead building, completed in 1897, Cardiff Bay.
A very short-notice photography opportunity turned up for me out of the blue a couple of weekends ago – a sequence of phone calls on Saturday evening led me the next morning to Cardiff Bay to stand in for a workshop leader from Photography Made Simple who’d been taken ill.
With no time to prepare (or to speculate on the unknown!), the fine day was at least a good start, and the bustling Mermaid’s Quay area offered a great variety of subject matter for photographing; but with only a couple of hours workshop time to introduce some basic principles of photography, get the group better acquainted with their cameras and view the results there was a lot to cover.
In spite of the hundreds of runners taking part in an event around the waterfront the small group of adults managed to find me at the agreed destination and after personal introductions we got going. Waterfront vistas, groups of musicians, and architectural details were visually explored and discussed between exercises in framing, aperture control, white balance tweaking and exposure compensation.
Good to share the results in a bar at the end of the session and see some very competent images, and gratifying to hear that everyone felt they’d learnt something new. All over too soon but hoping there may be more of the same; it was a really enjoyable activity and a very refreshing contrast to the large groups of schoolchildren I’ve mostly worked with over the last few years!
Liz Milner 