Commercial vs. Portraiture

I find myself almost giddy with the possibilities of fields of photography to explore. At this point, most interesting to me are child & family portraiture and commercial food photography. I love a beautiful, well done portrait of a child- one that really captures their personality. I also love well done food photography- those image that make you want to cook a certain recipe right now because that image with the recipe can make you almost taste it. I've ordered a food photography book to start looking into it. Who knows, maybe that'll be the direction I go for a while when we move and my in-house portrait subjects are really, really over having their picture taken. Or maybe I'll go there first. We'll see!

Photography Workshop

I'm on the waiting list for Wendy Shulz Photography Class. I should be able to get into the class just after the first of next year (2009), which works out well. It gives us a chance to get moved and settled a bit as well as actually afford the $500 fee. It's a small online class, 6 students, 12 weeks long. THere are 6 assignments broken down into 2 week blocks and lots of individual attention. I am really, really excited! The class has gotten numerous excellent reviews on the vendor review site I visited.

On that note, I am currently working on a metering and exposure study group through the ilovephotography.com (ILP) site. I posted a thread wondering if anyone else was struggling and wanted to work together & got a pretty great response. We've been putting together assignments with the help of a couple of mentors that we recruited. Of course the reality is that only a few people are actually participating, but so be it. I've taken the responsibility for keeping it moving forward and am getting a lot out of it. Currently we are working through a lighting boot camp where we are using artifical lights to just see how light falls. The lights are set up in a variety of scenarios and images are posted for analysis. It's been really helpful for me and I"m starting to look at light differently- what direction is it coming from, how harsh or soft is it, times when a lighting scenario would be appropriate for certain subjects but not others.

My theory on it is that if I'm going to pay $500 for a photo course, I want to go from OK to good, not from mostly unknowledgeable to just OK. I can do this work on the front in and go into the course with a fair amount of knowledge to build on.

It also just feel so good to really start moving forward with photography.