Photographing People – two presentations and a Workshop, in partnership with Alexander Collage in Cyprus. Context & story and natural light.

After the Wedding in Paphos, my next trip was to head over to Larnaca where I was to lead two presentations and a Workshop, in partnership with Alexander Collage in Cyprus. Thank you to all the students, helpers, both models, styling, hair, make up and all the extra effort put in to make this a success. The workshops were well attended and we had an amazing time.

We had a focus on creating images with context & story while also looking at ways to work with models and natural light.

(I would love to make a blog of images shot during the day, please send them in to [email protected] – no bigger than 650px on the longest edge. )

Models: Georgia Evagorou & Orthodoxia Panagi
Dresses : Panteli Pantelis
Styling : Andrea Christophi
Organised by Andreas Ayre

I arrived the day before the workshop, the hotel I was staying in was right next to church, which had a steady stream of weddings in a stunning church. I thought I would have a walk about with both the Nikon & Fuji camera and found some locations for the workshop the next day. It was quite fun shoot at a wedding as tourist or on-looker I should say.The D800 with grip, peli case in tow did make me stand out a little bit, leading to a few people thinking I was in fact the wedding photographer.  (link to Peli 1510 Blog)

The image above is from a real wedding photograph. I used these as inspiration  for the images below which we shot the next day with our models.  It was very useful to have the time to walk about and see where the sun was going to fall, where the natural framing could suit the mood of the images.

I had a walk about the local area and found some amazing locations, due to traffic, sun, and overall timings the next day we could not shoot with all the locations I found the day before, but we did have access to an amazing sea side fort, which is where the images below where created.Above image by Vavinov Alex

Most of the toning was done using Colour Look up tables. The Colour Replace tool was used to colour the trees from Green to Purple. Here is a quick before and after showing the changes that Photoshop was used for.

Shooting in the mid day sun can be very tricky. We spoke a few times about the best ways round these harsh shooting conditions.  It should be worth point out that all of the images in this blog were shot using natural light only. There was no additive lighting, but a slight reflector was using directly above. This was just to add light back into the dark silk dress.

Shooting in bright conditions and getting flat images can be hard work. The image above has been reduced in situation in Photoshop, but was also shot using ND filters & a Matte Box to reduce flare.  I placed the model and my self in a triangle with the Sun being 45 degrees of my right shoulder. the Mattbox stops the flare, with the ND’s giving me the ability to control the light. Shooting perpendicular to the light sun means you are not either shooting directly into or away from the sun, meaning you get the best use of the flat light. Bringing the models hair over her face creates the shadow to stop bright highlight and leaving a flat balanced light on the face.  Dropping down low also hid the busy beach front and gives a nice shot of the blue sky.

Shooting with the massive range of the D800 was pure joy, mostly for the massive dynamic range of the sensor. Photoshop was used to bring out a bit more detail in the sky, but the combo of a 0.9 ND Grad filter helped retain all the sky detail meaning the edit was much faster than normal. Also, it meant I could shoot a balanced exposure for the white dress when back lit. Due to the angle of the shot, without my trusty Matte Box, I would of had a big flare problem. The Sun is only a fraction out of shot, normally I would of had to block the light that was coming in and creating the flare, but the big hood deals with these shooting conditions with ease. Shooting with the Filters was amazing for sure. I had the Lee Seven 5 Filter kit for the Fuji X-Pro for a while, then started using it on the X-T1 when we had the updated camera. I found my self loving it for landscapes, but it really came into a new element when shooting in super bright conditions like these.In the morning we covered a few things about setting up shots. We talked about ways to frame up images and how to build images, looking at a number of ways to achieve this. The demo used was to set up a shoot before the models were in the shot then adding them in to the ‘set’.  Keeping the camera ‘locked’, we only moved the models about the ‘set’ to find interesting angles.  It also means you can be more flexible with your camera settings, if you want longer shutters speeds for example. i.e., Catching the slight motion of the dress in the image below.

‘when working with complex locations, sometimes setting the camera up on a tripod, you can start to build the image up without having to worry about perfect composition, find the angle that works and then place your models into the image. This is particularly a good way to shoot if you are working with changing light conditions, it means you can hold the camera perfectly still until the light is just as you wish, or that cloud passes.’

If you would like to keep informed of our workshops inside the UK and abroad , you can sign up to the Ideas & Images newsletter here – https://ideasandimages.co.uk/sign-up-newsletter/

After the shooting element of the day, we headed back to the very new and wonderful University building. The building was very wonderful, and all the staff were very welcoming.  (The coffee was was amazing too!)We spoke for a while about things that had came up during the workshop. Things like the state of the photographic community seemed an interesting topic, the wedding industry and working with models.

After some problems with my laptop and quick thinking we got set up to have a look at some images and show some sample edits.

*quick tip, my laptop only had a HDMI out, the projector only had a VGA in, so we hooked up another laptop that did have VGA out, then used Teamviewer to pass my screen on to a laptop that could connect. This worked out very well, but it seems that running Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge and running Teamviwer for HD quailty while trying to record my screen was a little much for my Laptop. – Tip is… Teamviwer is amazing.

Once I have this blog up, I will produce a video re-showing the editing style of using the Colour look up tables, smoothing the dress out and the other things we spoke about at the workshop –  Sign up to the news letter to get the updates. https://ideasandimages.co.uk/sign-up-newsletter/

Thank you to everyone who came along and I wish to pass an extra big thank you to Andres Aye whose hard work and effort brought the whole event together. Below is a small selection of other images during the two days in Larnaca – they were shot mostly on the D800, but some are shot in the Fuji X-T1

Not sure who took this image, but thank you and thank you to our models who worked so hard during the day.

Thank you to Andres for capturing this image of me shooting the Salt Lake images.

Check this link for other images from the workshop and trip to Cyprus here :link: