March Toronto Flickr Meetup: Techniques and Stuff

One of the fun things about these meet ups is learning new tricks. For some of the more experienced, it's nothing. For those of us just starting out, it's a whole new world. At the last meet up some one demonstrated an interesting technique called the "beer filter". Essentially what you do is hold your pint of beer in front of the flash while taking a picture. Here are two samples I did that night, the beer I was drinking at the time was called "Hockley Valley Dark Ale", very nice flavour and a great colour too.



Well I was sitting at one of the tables, Sui Gen picked up my camera and started taking pictures with it. I was curious to see what he was doing, but I was patient and waited till he was done. The next couple of pictures were what he took.


What he was doing was creating a blur of lights on the camera sensor and using a combination of slow shutter speed, flash, and pulling the zoom all the way back in at the same time. He demonstrated once more and then gave me the camera back to try it. Here were my two attempts.


Originally I didn't think anything happened in the first picture. You have to look closely at the bottom left to see anything, as well the picture has to be a bit larger.

Keeping your eyes open was key too. This is nothing about technique really. Some one said "Oh, that girl in that dress makes a nice match with that picture". Having my camera ready, I asked permission, and took two pictures. You learn sometimes from someone else's eye.



Well that's about it for today. Oh, except for one more picture. This has nothing to do with the meet up really. Just the technique I learned from Sui Gen applied this past Saturday night.

I think I learned well.

Paladin Phil