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Thanks very much Armenia Cole for this photo – me in action teaching the next generation of photography geniuses. I spent all of yesterday running portrait workshops at the National Scouts Photography School at Brookfields. We were working just in one room (and on the verandah) and my focus was on how to evaluate all the tools available to you in order to get a whole range of looks, working in a plain space with limited gear. I used the MacGyver analogy and it wasn’t actually until much later that I realised probably NONE of them had a clue who I was referring to. Definitely showing my age, haha.
We ran through all the ways you can use light from a single window to get a range of different moods in a portrait, just by repositioning yourself and your subject. The light changed during the day and some direct sun started to come in through the windows, creating bars of shadow across a wall, so we had a play with using those pockets of bright light to create dramatic portraits by exposing for the highlights. There was a fan in the room, so I showed the kids how we could use the protective wire as a ‘gobo’ , holding it close to the subject’s face in the direct sun to create a grid of shadows over the skin. The kids also got some cool shots by lying on the verandah and shooting right along the wooden boards to create leading lines to their subjects.
The kids obviously don’t have much gear and the luxury of things like off-camera flash, so it was cool having to go right back to basics. As I’d told them earlier in my talk, having constraints on what you can work with is often the best way to fuel your creative thinking!
But now… my taxi is here. Ski holiday time, yayeeee!!
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