Friday evening, we did a photo workshop. We've done these in many places around the world. Not being the passionate photographer Wife is, they have allowed me to learn much, improve my picture taking, while within the context of our traveling.
Often times we have a hard time finding one that is truly oriented toward photography. By that I mean, many of the workshops or photography tours we find are oriented toward providing tourists with pictures. They will promote that those participating will get great pictures to remember their visit and the photographer will take a bunch of pictures and provide them to the participant. None of that interests Wife and I at all.
However, if one reads the background of the photographer, one will often get hints that the one doing the tour has more experience or more interest in doing creative things. I've found we can reach out to these people. By explaining our background and objectives, and asking if they are willing to customize, we can get what we are looking for. This is exactly what happened with Wilson here in Penang. Our communication continued all through the day prior to our late afternoon workshop as we discussed how to adjust considering the lighting and weather.
Because of our different levels of photographic understanding, these workshops tend to focus on one person's interests. In this case, I was taking the lead because I had a specific thing I wanted help. I had learned a lot of techniques over the years we've traveled but that I had become stale and my pictures were starting to look the same.
We took our Grab to a small temple north of George Town, an area we never would have gone where Wilson has his studio. It turns out this is the neighborhood he was raised and has chosen to remain. Our initial work was in the studio with discussion and practice. Then we went out and shot on the temple grounds. A beach is right there so we went down to the beach to finish the shoot off. Wilson was very engaging other than the photography. We learned a lot about his life (he has an Italian girlfriend who works as a flight attendant for Lufthansa!). He has traveled extensively. He ended up inviting us out to diner and riving us back to our apartment. It was a really nice experience.
Let's see the results of the evenings efforts!
Wilson showed my things I could do with the white balance settings on my camera. We also discussed how to make more use of shadow - embracing it rather than trying to avoid it. We did some still life shooting in the studio to practice this.
Then we went outside and he discussed bracketing with me. I've heard a lot about this with Wife and others, but I don't use it an awful lot.
In this case, I wanted to bracket the tombs with the plants but couldn't quite make it happen so decided to make the plants the subject instead
Bracketing taken to an extreme perhaps 🤷🏻
More traditional bracketing
I then asked Wilson if he could help me with tree photography. I related how I love the natural patterns, flow, and textures in trees. But most of my pictures of them are end up just a jumbled mess. He encouraged me to pick out parts of the tree and do things with them.
Would you believe, there was a motorbike right next to one of the trees. I was able to continue the focus from the morning.
Here I was able to add the vignette of Wife and Wilson working to the tree theme
And photographing Wife is always one of my favorite themes
Then we went to the beach. There happened to be wedding photographer at work. This was a humorous occurrence as Wilson had told us his professional photography started with a wedding and portrait studio and he had hated it.
The external look of the photographer screamed self-absorbed attitude. This is probably very unfair. He's probably a lovely person. But it did make for fun with the shooting.
And as we were by the sea, there was going to the water in movement. Wilson asked me to focus less on the wave breaking and more on the energy of the water returning after the wave had broken.
I had an opportunity for some candid shots which remain a favorite of mine
By this time, the cloud cover had broken and the setting sunlight was creating some nice color. I was back with the original theme of the white balance and embracing shadow
I liked having the other themes of the wedding photographer and Wife in the foreground of the sunset
Just Wife and the sunset
The rest
1 comment:
Those still life photos with shadow are really interesting! It seems like you got a lot out of one lesson.
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