Photography Workshop - Hit The Lodge

The most profitable photography workshop I have attended is one that doesn't have rows of tables trying to sell me items. It isn't held in a huge hotel conference room with hundreds of people where you feel alone in a crowd. It doesn't even require you to have a fancy wrist band to get around the area. If you have not heard of such a workshop it's named "Hit The Lodge" and is only one amazing workshop out of many put on each year by Supershoots.

Here are some things you will be able to learn about at the Hit The Lodge event this year!

• Learn techniques in Fashion, Glamour, Commercial, Beauty,
  Photojournalism, Portraits, Fine Art Figure, and Swimwear.
• Outstanding instructors and mentors who are there to help you.
• Learn different lighting styles in Studio and on Natural Light
• Photograph beautiful models prepped with professional make up artistry!
• Enhance your portfolio, galleries, window display and self promotion pieces
• NEW for 2009 - Fine art figure seminars with dK

and...

• Light Room, Adobe Photoshop, and Retouching Seminars taught by...ME!

Yes, come see me teach on post production retouching techniques using Lightroom and Photoshop. It will be a great time to ask anything you are curious about with this software!

The duration of this event is 5 days. Plenty of time to fill the brain with all of the information you are looking for! The dates of the event is June 11-15 and is located in Pike County, Illinois.

If you can not make this event there are plenty of other events this year. Come to Supershoots.net (instead of .com) to be apart of the Supershoots community. Post images to your portfolio, post to the forum, write other users, take a walk on the runway. Come see what the hype is about! And, if you create an account, don't forget to add me and say hello! My portfolio is here!

---------------------------------------------------------------
Read a post I made about last years Hit The Lodge event here.

Las Vegas!

I just returned from 11 days in Las Vegas which I spent about 4 of those days mentoring and shooting for the LasVegas Supershoots event. Every cab driver that asked about our stay said that 11 days is way too much Vegas. They are right! It seemed like I was there three months!

In the past year I have set and attained a goal. My goal has to bring down how many frames I shoot but still attain the images I want. I used to shoot up to 70-100 frames to get one or two good images. Ridiculous I know! I have narrowed shoots down to less than 40. It takes time to see what the camera sees!

To the left/above is the lovely Leanna. When I saw her clothing I envisioned a Sports Illustrated type of cover shot on a beach. But, I didn't have a beach in the Vegas desert! So, I set this up using bounce light from the ground and a white wall at the hotel we were at.




A big thanks to Pete Springer for allowing me to use his strip light and trigger for this shot. I was excited about this image because it took only three shots. It's exactly what I wanted to walk away with. That made picking the best image fairly easy since they all three looked the same!

I changed the truck color from light blue to green because blue and yellow together wasn't doing anything for me.

Anyhow, this is Cheryl rocking the yellow bikini. She does a great job with posing instructions and she fell into what I asked her to do almost immediately. It's nice to have models fall into place for you!

I have never got to shoot with Laura until this Vegas trip. My file information says we shot together for 5 minutes. She can pull off the most interesting poses and angles. Hopefully we will have more time at another event.

This image was made in-camera and equally in post production. We didn't have anyone else around and no reflector or lights. (And only 5 minutes!) So, it was a shot in the dark to shoot an even exposure as possible and make it all come together in post production. You can see an un retouched version HERE.

Supershoot Video

The above video is a trailer for Supershoots events. This was made at this years BackToTheBeach event. A big thank you to Tim Jackson for recording and producing this video! If you are interested in attending a photography workshop, check out when and where they are located at supershoots.com

If you want to talk with Supershoot event attendee's, mentors, models and make-up artists, go to supershoots.net

Hit the Lodge 2008

If you haven't ever been to a photography event I would suggest any of the Supershoots events. More specifically the Hit the Lodge event.

Hit the Lodge is Supershoots biggest yearly event that I have attended twice now. It's a great place to stretch your knowledge in photography. From classes that are taught by those that have "been there" and "are there" to learning from other attendees. It's impossible to walk away without learning 100 new things and gaining some great images.

I'm still finding my pocket in photography, which proves to be a long hard road but enjoyable to walk. It's tough to learn and discern styles of photography. Especially glamor versus beauty. It's sort of like arguing Ford or Chevy at times. They blend on so many levels, but at the same time they are completely different in approach and goal. More on that in the future.

When shooting my mind is usually wrapped around the models personality and look. I try to make the best of whatever I'm shooting, and if i can I mix in a bit-o-fun.

Above is Maria. She is a friend of mine that attended her first Supershoots event last weekend. I have not shot her before and she hasn't done modeling at an event. She asked if we could shoot together in the morning before the event started to work on communication and flow. I believe she did a fine job! She fit in incredibly well and had a great time at the event. She will be back for events in the near future.

You can learn about other Supershoots events at supershoots.com.

Canon 20D
f/2 @ 1/125th
50mm
Strobe + White Umbrella

Peoria Supershoots 2008 (is now over)

This weekend was a Supershoots(.com/.net) event. The event was a complete success in the fact that, well, I had a lot of fun! I didn't shoot as much as I usually do since I was helping others with their cameras/posing/lighting/etc...

The event started Saturday morning at 9am, but all of the mentors arrived Friday during the day. We met up that Friday night, had some drinks, hung out at our home, played some drums, and was in bed by midnight.

Saturday went really well. I would have to say that the group attending was mostly full of people who really did want to learn more about photography. Sometimes you get those "one" guys (or girls) who are there for other various reasons, but I don't care to expand on that.
I spent the entire day on one high key set. If I had a gun then, I wouldn't be writing this post today. Though, I was proactive in working on my posing skills. Not "my" posing skills, but my ability to pose other people. Well, maybe somewhat my posing skills since I have found 'doing' a pose works better than 'explaining' a pose. It's somewhat queer, but non-verbal communication works very well in communicating with a model. Saturday ended at a Mexican restaurant in Peoria where I got to have great conversation with Jeff and his wife (Her name slips me).

Sunday started at 9 am with me teaching a digital retouching session. I arrived at 9:10. I'm so awesome. Anyhow, I took this session a different route than I have before. This time I asked for a few images from the attendee's to use as my example(s) in digital retouching. I would usually use my own, but what a better way to teach by putting myself on the spot and showing how I would approach retouching an image. I figured that the less "unknowns" during the entire process the better everyone could understand it. All of the techniques that I used were proprietary to Photoshop and very simple. I believe that the session went extremely well and that everyone walked away a better retoucher then before. I heard several "ohhs" and "ahhs" during the session, so I'm basing my information off of that. Well, and of the several attendee's that spoke to me personally afterwards with great appreciation. Thanks for that guys.
Sunday ended at Mings Chinese restaurant with many many laughs.

At the top is Kalleigh. She had a great persona in front of the camera and had no issues with going outside the box to create some great shots. This was my first time ever working with her, but it didn't feel that way.

Chelsea from Vegas

I worked on about 1/2 of the Vegas images right after we got back. Here it is 4 or 5 months later and I realized that I didn't retouch some images to send to the models. I probably missed 3 or 4 models and they never got an image from me! ahh!

See, since I'm a mentor at the photography seminars I have to set an example of shooting the models AND send them their images. The models work really hard for several days and hear "you look great!" or "this shot is awesome, check it out on the back of my camera!" but then a month after the event have to find that photographer on the internet and ask them for the images. I'm never 'that' photographer, but I'm afraid I almost become 'that' one.

Anyhow, the image above is of Chelsea. I finished retouching her earlier this evening. I did a lot of work on this image, but it may not look like it, which is my goal. If it looks over-retouched, then I have failed at keeping the image close to its original representation. Highlights in the hair were hand brushed. Several filters and overlays were used to bring out the texture in the back wall. A couple of warming techniques were used. Basic skin cleaning, but not much. Her skin was 85-90% of what it likes like on the final image. I made here eyes like jewels since they are the strong point of the image. I actually shot it in 3rd's and didn't crop in post. That isn't usually the case. Anyhow, to see the image better, click on it.