If I had to sum up my two day workshop in London in two words I’d say: EXHAUSTING FUN. Too be honest I’m still not completely recovered from my stay there. Getting dropped in a pile of work when you get home doesn’t really help either. I’ll post some more images soon but for now you’ll have to do with these three.

We spent the first couple of hours of the workshop going over the technical aspect of lighting and the basics of light. Most of the guys were already pretty advanced in that subject but it’s always good to freshen up your knowledge and that way we are sure to talk about the same things during the rest of the workshop. We also discussed going pro.

After that we proceed into the art of not knowing what the f#ck you are doing into a picture. The technical part of lighting really isn’t that difficult to master. Just add/substract, move, color the light until you get what you want. ‘Getting what you want’ is hard if you don’t know what you want. My experience is that many photographers forget one very important step in the process of taking a picture: the story or emotion. That’s why I like to go through the whole picture taking process with the participants. I asked them to come up with some assignments for me. The first one was to make a portrait of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor for a fictive interview in the Times wherein she denies she has anything to do with a chocolate smuggling scandal (yeah, I know). Since Angela was busy, Prabha was so kind to step in as our subject.

Next up they wanted me to do an advertising campaign for a manufacturer of glasses with Paris Hilton. After some brainstorming we decided to opt for a tagline like “Get good glasses to avoid embarrassing mistakes”. We waited for Paris for a while but since she didn’t showed up, Prabha was so kind to step in. And no, I don’t usually have a horse’s head in my lighting bag.

On the second day, it was my turn to come up with crazy assignments for the participants and give a few words of advice here and there. Check out the workshop’s Flickr group to see what the guys came up with. By the end of the day (that proved to be not anywhere near the end of the day), I was asked to do a mini-shoot with our model Nick to show how I work with a model. Nick said he could use some ‘darker’ pictures for his book, so we went to a tunnel and came up with this:

I had tons of fun and met lots of great people. Thanks for having me guys and a big thanks to Callum who organized everything perfectly.