Dean Collins on digital

There are people that have a major impact on your life, your career, your way of thinking etc.
For me without any doubt this was Dean Collins.
The way he explains photography is something that really opened my eyes, however also the way he taught with loads of humor,  but stil being able to explain something that seems incredibly complicated into understandable pieces of information, making people realize that in fact when you know your lights there really is not much that can’t be done. Dean mostly worked in an age where digital was not there, however here is a video fragment where he talks about digital and I think that this contains some VITAL information and will make (hopefully) some people think.

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Angela composited

Once every few weeks there is a very special workshop called Advanced II.
In this workshop I actually take a giant risk every time I teach it, the topic of the workshop is compositing.
The first 2 hours the students get a theory seminar about getting better shots based on not only model photography but also on street, sports, live and privat photography, this is always a very nice and inspiring part to teach, actually it’s also part of the tour we are doing “why fake it when you can create it”.

 

After this seminar the model is ready but we first select backgrounds, I want to have most of the shots we use for this seminar from my own library, in other words I don’t want to use stock that much. One can of course easily buy some stock images but for me most of the fun is knowing you have build everything from your own work. I do this first to determine the position and angle of view I place the lights and shoot from. Now the challenge lies in the fact that I set my self the task to do the compositing while the model gets ready for the next outfit, and trust me that’s sometimes not that long. Overal most composites you see in these workshops are done within 30 minutes.

 

Today I walk you to three of them very quickly we did last Friday (the 13th) with Angela.

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Vienna Day 2

Today some images from our second day in Vienna.
At the moment we moved from Vienna to our location to teach the workshops, and you probably already saw some images coming by via Google+ and twitter. But today I share some streetstyle images I did during our stay on day 2 in Vienna.

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Vienna Prater – day1

After yesterdays post I did not want to overload you with more images so I decided to keep the “Prater” images for today.
Prater is a large park in Vienna with a lot of different activities, one of the most famous ones is without a doubt the “carnaval”, I loved just walking around there, it’s a bit different than what I expected, a lot or the attractions are actually in “decay” especially on the outer edges of Prater. But for photography that’s interesting and I got a lot of great backgrounds for some compositing projects in the future 😀

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