Workshops Boston results

On September 11th and 12th I taught a two day workshop in Boston, in this blog post some images from this workshop and of course some information about the days.

At the moment I’m still working on some images, so except to see those tomorrow.

Friends thanks to the internet
The internet is a wonderful thing, thanks to forums and social media it’s easy to maintain friendships over distance, but also find new friends of course. I guess a year and a half ago I was contacted by Brendan Stewart from www.symbolphoto.com if I would be interested to organize some workshops in the Boston area. I love the states to teach so I was more than interested, however we changed the location to New York, thinking that would give us a bigger chance to fill the workshops. Brendan organized everything perfectly and visited me in the Netherlands a few days before I would travel to the states, we hit it off almost instantly. So when I knew I would be going to Photoshop World Las Vegas we planned on making a small in between stop and visit Brendan in his new studio in Boston…. but why not do a workshop at the same time ?  so the plan was born. In the end it grew into a two day workshop with one day of more intense learning and less shooting for the students and one day sort of a guided photoshoot.

Brendan knows Boston like the pockets of hit pants so he arranged some very nice locations for us to shoot, some of you will see here.

Day 1
We started day 1 with a Q&A in which the students could ask any question they want.
After this Q&A I started out by showing a simple setup that could be very interesting, starting out with natural light on auto mode, switching to metered and adding small flash on E-TTL and metered. By adding the amazing Rogue flash bender I showed what you can do with a very simple, but incredibly versatile device.
This is one of the shots from that session.
After this we did a small setup in the hallway of the studio, showing that a simple location can work great. This is one of the images I’m still working on, so that will be online tomorrow.

Now it was time to move outside.
The first location was a great one, an abandoned train full of graffiti.
The main focus in this area was to show the differences between natural light and strobes, but also how to choose the correct positions, angles, composition etc. and of course how to meter a more complex scene with reflections and bright sunlight.
The next location was a special road. This location I used to explain how to shoot HDR with one shot (inside joke), what I did explain was how to meter for a high dynamic range shot were there is a lot of sun and shade and how to use strobes to solve this problem and get a high impact shot. However the “hidden” topic was how to make sure you make the right shot and not include too much of the scene and shoot a snap shot of a street with a model in it, but really focus on a model shot. As added material I explained how to use a second light source (in this case the sun) to enhance the shot. Also differences in lenses, positions etc. were explained.

Next location was the harbor, during that piece I heard someone calling out my name so I turned around and found out that also in Boston people love the Kelbytraining videos 😀 and probably got a new student for the next Boston workshops. In this location I explained how to change the appearance of a scene, again choosing the right locations and using lens flare and heavy backlighting from the sun and how to meter for this.

After this location we went back to Brendans studio for the final part of the day, a nice BBQ on the roof of his studio.

Day 2
Day 2 was more aimed towards a guided photoshoot.
We started out at 8:00AM in a wonderful inside location called the “bond” room.
This is the perfect location to explain mixing strobes with tungsten and using mirrors to help you out with compositions that would otherwise be too wide, or in other words cropping everything into one “crop” that would normally force you to use a wider angle lens. (this shot I’m still working on). The shot you see next was shot as a special effects shot and started out as a silhouette.

After the Bond room it was time for the train again, however this time we went inside, and luckily for us the guy/women living there was not home, but we could smell that someone lived there, luckily it was not warm pffff

During this setup we created a standard shot which you can see here, and a more moody shot which I will post in tomorrows post. This scene I used to show 2 completely different setups and moods from the same location. Outside I also did some natural light shots, which will also be posted in tomorrows post.
 After the train we moved the “party” to the rooftop of one of the office buildings in Boston, giving us a stunning view over the city and a great sign to play with (see image on top of this blog post). This concluded the day for the group. It were two very intense days with long hours, but more than worth it. I think the students will have some great portfolio material (I know I have). The main focus of these workshops is to learn of course, but I love to also throw in some stunning locations were you can really see what’s happening instead of using the studio and just explaining it against a standard backdrop.

The night part
Being passionate about my work I felt it would also be cool to go back to the roof at night and because Brendan already planned this (:D) we went back to the roof with two models during sunset and stayed there till it was completely dark. I have to add that this was without any doubt one of the best experiences I have had in a long time, seeing Boston light up for the night was without a doubt one of my highlights from so far above.
Here is one of my fav shots from that night, and again more tomorrow. 

The original planning was to have all the images done by now, however I’ve experienced some problems with my backup drives (being full) so we first had to copy everything to bigger drives taking too much time to complete all the images, there are way too many 😀 Most images don’t need a lot of work because I try to do everything in camera but I still want to look closely at them, that’s why most images are not done yet and I have posted the ones I did during our stay in Boston on my laptop.

Video
During the workshops we shot all setups and the Q&A with mostly two cameras and a voice recorder (for my voice), I will be going through the material next week and the coming weeks it will be edited to form a new “live” instructional DVD. It will be 100% different from what we did before and will hopefully set the start of a new series of DVDs which will be filmed live during demos, seminars and workshops. The language of this one will be English with probably Dutch subtitles for the Dutch market. A release date has not yet been set, but we always work as fast as possible 😉

Many thanks
Via this last entry I want to give many thanks to Brendan and his beautiful fiancee for keeping up with us for a week and showing us a very good time and some of the most beautiful spots of Boston, Maine and the Mountains. We will be back in March for a visit and …… a new workshop.

If you want to join us in March for the workshops please drop me a mail.