Yesterday it was time for the workshop Studio Technique 2.

For this workshop the team was:
MUA : Renate
Model : Marie

Renate wanted to work on her portfolio and kindly offered her services to me and I thought a workshop would be a great place to do that, and Marie…. well she needs no introduction of course for people that have been following my work longer than a few months. She has been one of my models for many years and without a doubt one of the models I love to work with over and over again.

On that issue (what makes a good model) I could write several blogposts (if you want I can, just let me know) but there is a reason I keep working with a steady team over the years. We do a lot of testshoots during the year and to be honest from the maybe 20 we do there is maybe 1 model that has potential enough to do the workshops for me and even from them only a few do some workshops. Maybe I’m just too critical 😀

During the Studio technique 2 workshop there is a lot of attention for the posing and coaching of the model and the start of story telling, there is no room yet for too much accessories but we do give attention to a bit of styling and working with angles.
So let’s see some of the images.

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Yesterday it was time again for the Advanced workshop.
In this workshop there is always a lot of attention to finding the correct angles and working with more advanced story telling, movement and posing. As with all the workshops there is a clear difference in approach between the different workshops. In this case most of the shots you see are done with one lightsource but as a theme for advanced it meant to really look at what you’re doing and being able to let the light do what you want it to do.

For the first series we used the Elinchrom Deep Octa with a grid attached.

And as usual there is also some attention for the different lens choices, and the difficulties that this brings in posing and distortion. After this the difficulty is moved up a bit by using a striplight with grid to make the light a bit more difficult to steer exactly where you want it, attention had to be given to the staircase but without the staircase and the wall taking away from the model. In the workshops all the light setups are explained with light metering to predict exactly what the light does, this will help the students in situations were there is no dark studio were you can see the modeling lights, but were you have to work with natural light that is added to the strobes and washes away the modeling lights, or when using speed-lights where there are no modeling lights. I’m a strong promoter of using a light-meter and by showing this kind of setups and explaining how easy you can measure it and this way letting the light do exactly what YOU want has often pushed the students to using the light-meter (again).

So here a sample of the strip-light shots.

After this setup it was time to play a bit with motion and freezing jumps, falls, dance etc.
For me personally always one of the most fun things to do, every jump shot is different and can never be repeated exactly the same way, for the blog I choose not a jump shot but these two just for fun “freaking Nadine” shots.

Finally it was time for the story telling part, as usual with Nadine she always prepares something special for the end of the shoot and this time it was not different. The most difficult light-setup is used for this setup with an Elinchrom Maxilight with custom grid aimed through the stairs. The difficult part for the students is to find the angles and also the light. First I started with a normal lens and switched to the wide to show the impact for the story telling factor that a different lens choice CAN introduce.

This ended the workshop for this Friday.
I’ve been teaching the workshops for several years now and the most asked question is “Do you still like it ?” well I have to say that I understand the question, I teach app 2 workshops a week in our studio in the Netherlands so one could think that it becomes routine, however there are some things that I do to make sure I enjoy the workshops still the same way the first time I started with them.

By changing the studio often and introducing different themes in the Advanced en Glamour workshops I keep not only the workshops interesting for the students but also for myself. During our stay in Florida for example we got a whole new floor above the makeup and relax room, to get there we need a staircase and as you can see in these images that staircase is of course used immediately in the workshops. For the students this is interesting because they learn how to use something you can find almost everywhere and not only in a studio, for me it’s interesting because I can work out many new ideas (this is just the beginning). In a few weeks we will invite some painters that will paint the new walls into a themed setting like they did with many other walls in the studio.

Working this way and also by refreshing the workshops theory part often the workshops are still very much fun to teach but also for students to come back to time and time again…… it’s always new and fresh.

Add to this the workshops I teach on the most beautiful locations in the states and Europe and I can honestly say…. Yes I still love it every day 😀

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