Christopher Wallace
Hometown News Story
Alexander City
I had an amazing opportunity to develop more of my photography skills this week. I have never had the opportunity to take classes in this field or learn under a mentor, so I always just watched YouTube videos and read PDFs to learn photography. This week, I was given the opportunity to work with a magazine and expand my skills further. The way I was given this opportunity was by attending the Alabama Press Association Summit a weeks ago and being introduced to the current president of the association. The president is named Kenneth Boone. Boone has owned his own photography agency and is owner of his own publication. One of my teachers offered to have me work with him on the next issue of his magazine, which he agreed to.
The day finally came for me to get to work. I had no idea what sort of day I’d be in store for. I had to head to Alexander City, AL. That is where his publication was. The scenery was beautiful on the way there and the people I encountered were even friendlier. I pulled up to the publication, shortly after to be greeted by Kenneth Boone. We discussed our plan for the day which included photographing houses values as low as a million dollars, photographing vegetation, a wine emporium, and scenes on Lake Martin for his magazine.
We quickly set off to our first house. He taught me how to photograph outside and inside images for a magazine. For residential photography, photographers shoot in HDR. HDR is combining images into one image to get an image with equally distributed light. This was how photographers could photograph rooms but still be able to see our if the windows. It was quite the experience where I learned many new tricks.
We then went to photograph wild ginger for a story. I learned how to effectively do macro-photography which is used to photograph small subjects like bugs, coins, or other small objects. When then went to photograph house and people fishing on the lake where I learned how get certain angles of lake houses and people fishing that show off the lake as well as the subject. Shooting for magazines is fun but the different ways to manipulate photographs to make pictures for ads and lifestyle was even more interesting.