We were invited to bring our cameras to the on-board photographer, Sean O'Connor, to review so that he could give us critiques or suggestions. He pronounced my photos as having "good composition." He pointed out that I should look for the flashing white or black areas in my photo and consider it a "hole in the frame.' Also, watch for camera shake. Since I don't have a tripod or monopod, providing a stable platform needs to be a consideration.
Sean liked one particular photograph of what he called a "foss helibore" , which means "wind twisted wood." I just knew I liked the way it looked! Those helibores are exposed to the wind, often above the tree line. Sean suggested that I should leave a 30% outside edge for cropping, so that I don't lose important parts of the image. Instead, I filled the frame with exactly the photo I wanted to see, with no border.
In the areas we walked in with many trees, where everything is green, underexposre by approximately 2/3 stop using the +/- button. Moving the wheel to the right is under-exposed, and to the left, over-exposed. 3 turns on the wheel is 1 stop. For the aperature and shutter, under-expose "hotter" colors.
Later in the trip, I spoke with several other guests regarding their opinion of Sean and the photography option. One gentleman was very generous and said that he did not view this as an instructional cruise (which had been my opinion) but that there would be many photographers on board, with whom he could compare notes on technique and equipment. The advertisement for the water portion of the trip was billed as a "photography cruise" and said that a Pentax representative would be on board for seminars and instruction, and that we could use that equipment or our own. This was not the case.
Another man was much more critical. He was a more experienced photographer than myself, and was very unhappy over what he felt was a representation of what was promised. He felt that Sean was unprepared for this type of instruction and did not satisfy even the most basic rules in presentation, which is to ensure your audio-visual equipment works! The seminars did not address the needs of the group and were instead a self-promotion: hire me, see my projects, buy the equipment I'm promoting. He made sure to tell of his dissatisfaction in his review of the trip.
In my opinion, it did not deliver the promised product. Tom noted that while there were a number of folks with the mega-lens, etc, there were also quite a few SLR folks. He thought it would have been more helpful to offer different seminars geared to those needs. For the SLR folks, how to frame a photo and work with basic exposures, etc would have been helpful. We never did receive information on photo storage and other programs which was promised. Sean was very disorganized in his presentation, from the AV failure to a simple lack of focus in his speaking. He clearly has an artistic skill and is excited about his projects, but seeing them did not improve my photography skills.
Being the total auto-focus geek I am, I did learn to step outside the "green zone", however, and that was a good thing for me. I learned a couple new tricks and tried them out with success, so it was not a total failure; it just could have been much better.
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