February 2010 Portrait Workshop
This is the third year that Hank hosted a Portrait Workshop at his studio exclusively for our club. Hank provided four separate sessions for us in order to accommodate our membership. Hank does all kinds of photography; Family, Wedding, etc., but specializes primarily in High School Senior Portraits.
Each session began by Hank explaining how his studio is set up. He explained all about the lighting he uses and his backgrounds. He even explained his workflow, from his initial processing to sending out his images to his favorite lab, Oak Color, for printing.
He then took readings from each of his lights to determine the correct camera settings to use and explained how critical the White Balance setting is in our cameras. Then, one at a time, we shot the White Balance target and adjusted our aperture settings to achieve the best setting in Custom White Balance.
Hank provided us with several beautiful young ladies two seniors, Ashton and Olivia on Saturday and on Sunday we had Kristen, a Sophomore and Sammie, a recent graduate. All four young ladies were very eager for the modeling experience and agreed to pose for our workshop.
The young ladies not only had the looks, but seemed to have a natural talent for knowing how to pose. Each member had their turn using the trigger and gave the model direction. The young ladies were eager to please us and automatically changed position between each shot into another pleasing pose when we ran out of ideas.
Hank used various props and backgrounds, giving the members a range of pictures. Hank also offered posing suggestions as appropriate, like “Tilt your head,” “Close your eyes,” “now open them” so we could capture the shot.
Hank uses a classic Honda motorcycle for his senior portraits as one of the props. He had it set up for us and each session we were permitted to use it with the models. This extended our opportunities for unique poses as much as we could imagine.
Since we had 24 members attend the two day workshop, the sessions were smaller giving all of us ample time to take lots of shots of the models in different outfits under great lighting setups. We learned about posing, studio equipment and our camera settings.
We had a lot of fun. Please go to the website and check out all of our pictures!
Thanks Hank, for all the time and effort you put into doing this workshop for us, and to the models for being so patient, co-operative and overflowing with enthusiasm.
Great workshop!!!
By Bonnie Matthews, Portrait Workshop Chair
