Workshop Dublin 8 September 2010

Today it was time for the workshop.
With the workshops during the Photovision Roadshow I choose to do very small groups instead of the bigger workshops we do during the weekends independent on a tour. This way I can also work a bit on my own portfolio and give a different kind of workshop. I love doing both of course but both are slightly different experiences for both me and the students.

We started out with a small round table conversation about technique and explaining everything from calibrating the lichtmeter to light control and measuring the light, but most of all calculating the light response, or in other words… what you need to make a white background or a black background with the meter within seconds.
To bring some of the techniques into practice we went outside with the first model and started a urban like session………

It’s always fun to see the reactions from people walking by, and also here the positive Irish attitude showed when two police officers approached our set, they stopped and watched for 2-3 seconds and walked away, I can tell you I was already preparing all kinds of excuses because we did not have a permit this time, we were in the public areas around the hotel, and because we had a LOT of backup locations I was willing to take the risk, also taking into account that everyone told me that there would be no problem at all… and indeed, this is the way it should be of course.

After the first location it was time for a “small” lunch. Every time I’m in the UK (Ireland) and the States I really wonder what a big lunch would look like because small is just ridiculously large, plus I can’t get used to have fries as lunch 😀

Next up was our next model, we moved the gear to the parking lot of the hotel were there were some very nice old walls and curves with structure. We also found a very nice bicycle which we were allowed to use from the owner, it made a great prop as you can imagine. The exercise with the second setup was finding the angle and story, but also “crazy lightsetups that might or might not work, but actually always do”.

Next up was the first inside location, for this location we choose the stairs of the hotel and the students were forced to find angles with wide angle lenses and a fairly simple light setup. To be honest this is always one of the hardest setups because the light from itself is nice but not extraordinary so the whole look has to be made by the students by carefully coaching the model and finding the right angle to work with the distortion of a wide angle.

After this it was up to the restroom……. ???
Yes you read that correctly, how often I get the question about how big a studio should be is incredible, and in fact it really doesn’t matter, as long as the model fits and the lights you can shoot, to demonstrate this we used the very small restroom, used one strobe with grid and shot a series in a great extreme outfit, I loved this setup a lot so to be honest I shot way too many pictures with this setup…. 🙂

The final setup was back in the seminar room, for this setup we used the open window and the students were told to show the area where the shots were taken. In this case it was easy because choosing two positions showed two totally different but very remarkable landmarks. After making the composition it was also time to use the techniques we discussed about mixing light but above all make a real natural looking imaging without showing too much flash. So we did several different mixes from natural light only, to clearly shown strobes to natural looking fill in flash.

Of course we shot some video backstage with the iPhone4 and this evening I edited it all together in a small video which I think you will like.

I would send MANY MANY thanks to the following people who made this workshop possible :
Paddy from Barker Photography for lending us all the gear we needed (Paddy you Rock).
Kathryn my amazing Makeup Artist
Stephan the creative hairstylist
The students
Susan and Pauline the models
And of course not to forget my wife Annewiek for being my assistant and filmer
And finally the Isaak hotel for helping us out and letting us use which ever location we wanted