Lifestyle Arts: Workshops

Catching up...

2008 was filled with traveling and shooting. I am finally getting to some of the images I shot and wanted to share an awesome experience with you all.

Last November I was fortunate enough to be able to fly to Atlanta and take a hands-on workshop with Zack Arias. Zack hosted the workshop in his new studio just outside the city. He has a wonderful teaching style... he uses a lot of his past experiences to help demonstrate important points in business and photography. Some of the great take aways I got from him was to never go in debt for your business, to spend time with and love your children and to stay down to earth. Oh and to not photograph in front of a plain brick wall or railroad tracks...

Recently Zack has been reviewing photographers' websites on his blog. Two friends of mine were reviewed, Dave Jackson and Jay Eads - great job gentlemen! If you are a photographer reading this... check out Zack's critique's - it might bring some insights to how you are presenting yourself. I know I have a lot of work to do on my site!

Back to the workshop...

I've been playing around with light for a while... obviously, I'm a photographer. But I never really understood every aspect of lighting. I guess you can say I got lucky a lot. This workshop helped me put together all of the bits and pieces I had in my brain and really put it together to make it work. Since November I've been able to use my developed skill set on numerous shoots, including Tyler's head shots, Kanoe in Hilo, Hawaii and most recently my film noir boudoir sessions. I'm looking forward to the busy wedding season to further develop these skills.

Here are some images from the workshop...

Here Zack is setting up lights...

Here he is explaining his camera settings...

My shots during the workshop...

After the sun went down we broke into groups of 4 ... each group got a model, a light and a modifier. We all took turns setting up the lights... I set up and executed the following three photos.

It was so much fun to experiment in such a great atmosphere... I would love to get together with any local "stobists" to play around with lighting techniques!Source URL: https://lifestyleartsblogs.blogspot.com/search/label/Workshops
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WPPI 2008 :: Mike Colon's Plus Class

I am finally getting to my blog entry on WPPI 2008 in Las Vegas. After I returned home after 8 days of being away... our entire family was struck with the stomach flu for Easter and pretty much the entire week after. Andy and became healthy enough to attend another two seminars in Chicago last weekend. My brain is SO full of so many ideas I feel like I am going to burst!

I would like to tell you about my experience at the world's largest photography convention and trade show and to help me stay organized I will write recaps of each day.

Day 1 - Wednesday
I arrived in Vegas late at night. I was unable to get a hotel room for that night... luckily Danielle was kind enough to let me stay in her room for the evening. We ended up chatting about photography until after 1:00am... little did I know this was going to be an early bedtime compared to the rest of the week!

Day 2 - Thursday
It took forever to find the room for Mike Colon's Plus Class. But once I arrived I was finally able to see what the "man" is all about. The class was pretty awesome. We talked about some of the fundamentals of photography. It was a good review for me and he also challenged us to shoot completely in manual mode - as well as manual white balance. I was up for the challenge.

The class had two models come after lunch. The group of 20 photographers headed outside and shot the models on the grounds of Bally's. Shooting alongside of Mike Colon was pretty cool! His colleague Ray Santana (aka Uncleray) was very helpful and encouraging to us. After a long day of sitting in a classroom this 2.5 hour shootout was a ton of fun!!!

Day 3 - Friday
This was the second day of the Plus Class with Mike Colon. Just a background on Mike, he is a "rockstar" photographer. He is all around awesome. His approach to shooting, his technical abilities and his all around charm make him one of the best photographers in the industry today.

On this day Mike actually took time to critique some of the images from the day before. He choose several of my images to critique. I am going to be honest and say some of them were not very good. I was sooooo focused on the technical side of shooting in complete manual mode that I lost touch with the artistic side. I learned a lot from his critique.

Right after lunch two more models came and we were able to go out and shoot again. This time my game was on. I had sooo much fun shooting. The technical side came sooo much easier for me and I was getting some rockin' shots.

Here are some of the highlights: