Greetings on the great Thursday morning!
How do you get a good portrait, every time
you click your shutter? You need great lighting, nice composition, and a good pose
and expression on your subject. What if you only have two minutes to get that
shot? It is imperative to know how to create or find those
elements as quickly as one, two, three.
To learn great lighting you can study the
Old World Masters, like paintings and sculptures by Caravaggio, Michelangelo,
and Rembrandt. Looking at the same sculpture with different lighting on it is a
great way to learn about and experiment with light. If you have a live person
willing to be your sculpture, great! If not, get a sculpture (like a little
garden nymph) you can use over and over.
There is another even more effective way to
learn, that is in an intense master class with a great photographer. I had the
privilege last fall of a week in Italy with Clay Blackmore and David Ziser. A
lot of what they taught I knew already, but I was kind of putting it together
by accident. By the end of that week, I could see and create perfect lighting
and poses in a matter of a couple minutes. (The last three days, they made us
do it.) I had to put this to practice last month when I shot portraits of 65
business women in one day!
www.clayblackmore.com
You may not have the ability to go to a
Master Class in Italy, but you can go to a three day seminar with Clay
Blackmore FREE, right from your home, online. July 29 through 31 CreativeLIVE
will be recording a video of Clay teaching his Pose It, Light It, Love It
workshop. When they record these, they are broadcast live online free, and you
can respond to them with questions live. Check it out at http://www.creativelive.com/courses/pose-it-light-it-love-it-clay-blackmore.
While at creativelive.com check out the
other courses you can enjoy FREE. Click on the calendar tab at the top of the
page and they are all listed. Last month I watched The Wedding Project with Doug Gordon and right now I’m watching Duct Tape Marketing with John Janstch. I
have added Children’s Posing Guide with
Tamara Lackey, and Mastering TTL
Flash with Mike Fulton & Cody Clinton, as well as Clay Blackmore’s
class, to my calendar for July.
Maybe portrait photography isn’t your bag. You
can take in Food Photography with Andrew Scrivani or Travel Photography with John Greengo. You can also take training
on Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop in July. Even if I can only
watch portions of the seminars, I gain immensely from them. I usually have them
on in the background while I am working on my computer so that when I hear
something that really fills a need I have, I can click over and take it in.
Sometimes I watch most of the seminar, sometimes just a little. I decided at
the end of Doug Gordon’s to buy the video because it was so helpful.
So, my exhortation for Thursday is go to CreativeLIVE.com
and take advantage of great, free
learning experiences. It will greatly augment what you learn at AIPOD.
