Straight after Isla & Stuart's wedding, I jumped on a plane to Paris to spend a week (and a lot of money!) on a workshop run by the amazing Jerry Ghionis. This guy is truely one of the best in the world, so many awards and titles to his name! I have been wanting to attend one of his workshops for years and just finally bit the bullet and booked myself on the Paris workshop even though it was sandwiched in between weddings!
On arrival in Paris on the Sunday night, I had a walk about town with 2 of my fellow workshop attendees, Marco and Michael from South Africa. What a blast, the night was fair and the Eiffel Tower was lit up like a beacon!! Unfortunately on my return to the hotel, I went to start blogging the trip and found that my laptop had blown up!
Monday morning was then spent trying to find someone to repair my laptop, which unfortunately proved to be difficult, it was totally beyond repair! So I ended up spending silly money on a rental laptop just so I could get through the workshop..... Bit of a waste of a morning too but hey...
Registration in the afternoon and straight into critiques of some of our own images (for which I just had to show some images from this blog!!) This was hardcore, no fluffing, no butt-licking, just good honest critique. Didn't go down too well with some, but hey you don't spend over £2,000 to hear "You rock!" I was very pleased with hearing what I could do to improve my images, and was happy to find myself already seeing what Jerry was about to say about others, about halfway into the critique.
There was a true international feel to this workshop - as well as others from the UK, there were photographers from as far flung as Hong Kong, South Africa, Belgium, Denmark, the States and Russia on board!
Day 2 - posing - argh that horrible word! But actually not posing, directing, in order to make beautiful look even more beautiful!! I have gone from a 100% photojournalistic/reportage style of wedding photography to recently bringing in a little contemporary modern shooting style into the couples session part of the day and this was one reason why I wanted to go on this course - I knew that Jerry was truely a master at this style of photography.
After a great session in the morning, we went out shooting in the afternoon with models. Rene and Melissa from Boston are already known to me, and it was wonderful to meet up with them again. Marco and Liz from Boston are getting married this August, what a hot and steamy couple they are! And the last model was Evgenia, originally from Russia but now living and working in Boston. All the models are photographers themselves and they were all amazingly patient with us all!
We walked about town, Jerry just stopping every so often when there was some interesting light or location. I don't want to know what he was asking Evgenia here...........
Jerry was excellent at directing the model and gave us a load of tips on getting the best out of what were already gorgeous people!
He really does love his work!
We were in Park Monceau, the light was amazing, the Parisians were enjoying the sun and we were all having a ball!
Mind you, some of the Parisians loved watching beautiful people "get it on" too!
We even did some amazing night shots using the most bizarre of light sources! We ended up at the Arc D'Trioumphe both above and underground!
There are so many amazing images to show from this time away, and Jerry has very kindly allowed us to blog these images so for me the best way to show them off is via slideshow!
Suitably appropriate music by the wonderful Caroline!
No comments:
Post a Comment