Our First Photo Walkabout

A few months ago, I joined a local group of people who wanted to learn more about photography.  We’ve been focusing on portrait photography at the moment, and last weekend, we had our first out and about brief.  We wanted to capture portrait style pictures of people at our local Saturday market in Wells, Somerset.
Here’s the brief that Stuart Baynes (the retired pro photographer who leads the group) set for us all:

He advised that we spend about 15 minutes of our time just getting the camera settings right and trying to create or establish what type of photos we wanted to take.  Then, once you’d achieved the look you were happy with, the rest of the time meant you could leave the camera settings as the were and just focus on trying to achieve the brief.  I faffed around for a bit, feeling a bit self conscious standing in a busy market with my camera.  I found people were a bit wary of me and my camera, wondering what I was up to!  After a while, I got up the nerve to wander around and take some photos.  As the market got busier it got a bit easier to go unnoticed by the stall holders.
About half way through, I bumped into Stuart again who asked how I was getting on.  It wasn’t majorly successful at that point, as I was reluctant to approach the stall holders (it doesn’t help being a tiny bit shy).  However, Stuart has the gift of the gab, and instantly started chatting to a lady who owned an artificial flower stall.  He explained we were from a local camera group and just trying to capture portrait photos.  He asked if she’d mind if I took some photos of her and her stall.  After that, Stuart wandered off and I began chatting to the lady.  She was more relaxed in my presence and I started taking pics of the flowers.  I said I could send her my photos, as she was planning on setting up a website, so she gave me her email address.  Sadly, I’ve not heard back from her, so perhaps the pics weren’t quite up to scratch!

The hour was nearly up, so I headed back to the fruit and veg stall where I seemed to be having the most luck.  The light had changed and was creating a beautiful aura around the stall.  In just the final few minutes, I captured a few of my favourite images, so it does show not to give up!
Our photography group has loaded all our images from Saturday into a shared public folder on Facebook.  You can look here if you want to see all our results:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.281886029101858&type=3
We’re meant to be critiquing each others’ photos, but I’m not quite sure where to start.  I like some more than others, but I want to say things postivitely, as we’re all learning.  Hopefully I’ll get some tips on that too.
Finally, we had to whittle down our photos to just 3 to upload onto Facebook.  That was a mini window into being an editor.  It was tougher than I thought it would be and yet I still somehow managed to choose 3 photos from the same stall, without realising…d’oh.
I don’t have any post processing tools like Photoshop or Lightroom.  All I currently have access to is Microsoft Photo 2018.  It allows me to do basic adjustments like cropping, altering brightness and setting filters.  I decided to try 2 filter effects: Zeke and Vanilla.
I can’t find an official definition for Zeke, but it essentially gave all my photos a sunshine glow.

Then I tried the Vanilla effect.  Regular people like me call it Black and White!

And finally, just for comparison purposes, here are my unfiltered photos from the market:

So, what have I learnt?

• Get your camera set up and ready and be happy with the results before you start your actual session.  Then, you can focus on what you see rather than constant camera adjustments.
• Have an opening line prepared to talk to people.  Many people are friendly and understanding when you say you’re an amateur photographer.