Category: Courses

Announcing theLightMatters Photography Training and Workshops

 Gavin   Back to Basics, Courses, Journey, Strobist, Studio, Techniques, theLightMatters, Tips

I’m really excited to announce the launch of my new photography training, photography workshops photo-shoot experience days through theLightMatters Workshops.

It’s not just a photography workshop though. It’s the foundation of a local photography community, centred around Guildford, Surrey. My vision is to create a lively and exciting group with a varied repertoire of subject matter. We’ll be shooting in the studio and on location. We’ll be using many different kinds of light from pure, natural light to speedlites to studio flash and mixing them up a bit too. Oh yes, and we’ll be making some great images along the way.

My goal is to run a mixture of group shoots and workshops, Continue reading Announcing theLightMatters Photography Training and Workshops »

creativeLIVE

 Gavin   Courses, Journey

If you, dear reader are serious about improving your photographic skills I’d recommend taking a look at creativeLIVE.com. The site is devoted to making quality on-line training videos but what separates it from the rest is that the webcasts are free whilst they are recording. You also can pay a fee after the event to download the material in HD if you choose.

I’m about half way through a 3-day workshop/seminar with Zack Arias at the moment. He’s been going through all aspects of studio lighting and I really mean all aspects. The great thing about the live sessions is that you not only get to see and here the presenter but can also ask questions via the chat rooms too.

Advanced Lighting with Adam Duckworth

 Gavin   Courses, Journey, Photographers

I met Adam Duckworth back in April 2009 when I took his course on Advanced Lighting Techniques, courtesy of theFlashCentre.

Advanced studio lightingTo be brutally honest, I was really nervous when I booked myself on the course, having virtually no studio lighting experience to speak of other than a day’s studio macro course and fiddling with my own studio lights. I have to say though that Adam was really great to spend the day with. I learned so much from that single event. Much, much more than I could have hoped for. I can certainly see why he has been awarded Editorial Photographer of the Year.Advanced studio lighting

It wasn’t just Adam either.

We had a great model for the day, the lovely Leah, and I learned nearly as much from her as I did from Adam himself. Between then they made a great team. The whole day was very relaxed and informal and totally charged with positive energy. I think I floated all the way home down the M6.

Adam and Leah between them were very instrumental in me deciding upon a career change and indeed the birth of this very blog.

Continue reading Advanced Lighting with Adam Duckworth »

Wedding gallery now available…

 Gavin   Courses, Digital Darkroom, Journey, Lightroom, QTWeddings, Techniques

I wanted to post a gallery from the wedding seminar earlier, but coming down with swine flu this week really scuppered all my plans 🙁 🙁 :-(. I’m starting to feel a lot better now so I spent an hour this evening making this.

Hope you like it. NB the image quality has been reduced to make the file sizes smaller and no sharpening applied yet. Some of the images would benefit from this extra boost. My excuse is I’m still not really with it owing to the piggy flu and I simply forgot to do it in LightRoom.

Ho hum,

Gavin

Wedding Seminar, Day 4

 Gavin   Courses, Journey

And so we come to the end of the course. Today’s theme being all about the business.

This was the module that I was most looking forward to and one of the primary reasons I booked myself onto the course. Through my portraiture work I very rapidly realised that to run a photographic business, the photography was only a very small per centage of the whole. Marketing, sales, the supply chain, order processing, accounts all play a major part too as do the protective elements of insurance and legal. As much as I would love to keep costs down by doing it all myself, I have to be  a realist. Some of this is going to have to be outsourced. If not, I’ll be saddled with a lot of peripheral activities that I don’t really want to do. Continue reading Wedding Seminar, Day 4 »