Portrait Perfect

Over the weekend I attended an event at Fanshawe College put on by Henry’s School of Imaging called Portrait Perfect. My friend Ren invited me down, so I brought my friend and neighbour Cam down to London for the day.

Included in the day-long talk were five different sessions covering lighting, the art and business of fashion photography, searching for inspiration, and designing an image from start to finish, including post processing. The lighting session was done by Jim Ogilvie, a fashion and beauty photographer out of Toronto. The remaining sessions were covered by the keynote speaker, New York City-based portrait and fashion photographer Lindsay Adler.

I have a small light kit at home that I don’t use much, so all the talking on lighting from both speakers has made me want to get myself much more comfortable with it. Lindsay spoke about how much she can stretch a budget on her shoots and still get some pretty fantastic results. She puts a crazy amount of effort into her work—including scouting locations, bartering, feeding people, and, of course, photographing models—and it shows. Her imagery is nothing like I’ve seen before and made me appreciate fashion photography far more than I had before. Once you see my work you’ll immediately realize that I have zero fashion shots, but Lindsay’s words and advice can be applied for many different styles and types of creative work.

Both Lindsay and Jim shot tethered to a laptop during their presentations so we could see what they were doing instantly. I was more than impressed to see their shots right out of the camera. I was even more impressed when Lindsay did some post-processing work right in front of us. It was basically magic.

The whole day was equal parts informative and inspiring.