OUR APPRENTICE sayS…

Initially I struggled with the long lenses, and I shot everything that moved, which meant I had thousands of shots to trawl through, but with Lou’s expert guidance, I started to get my eye in, and soon became a bit more discerning. Lou’s advice on focusing modes, and where to focus, made a big difference to my hit rate, but for me the biggest lesson was the importance of ISO, and using it to enable smaller apertures when more depth of field is called for. In the past I’d have just set my lens’s widest aperture to blur out the background as much as possible, but when you’re shooting at close range with a 600mm lens, you have to be much more discriminating if you want your subject to be sharp from front to back.