Four Days of Learning

Hi Everybody - it's been awhile again. I attended the Maryland Professional Photography Association (PPA) 2008 this past weekend - Friday thru Monday with 4 great speakers - Hanson Fong, Mark Campbell, Jamie Hayes and Mary Fisk-Taylor. Learnd some about studio work, flow posing, work flow, high-end glamour photography, and high-end marketing. I don't know how much will stick or how much I can apply about the marketing when the Hayes and Fisk team charge $300 for a studio portrait session, $125 for an 8x10 print, $1000 for an oil-touched 16x20 photo, and hope to average about $3000 per studio session. They partner with businesses like Saks, Mercedes Benz, and other high-end businesses in the Richmond area hoping to capture that type of clientel. If you are reading this, I have to assume that you are in this class of client. Just kidding. Like our photography and your life, our prices are real - for real people.

I submitted a print for competition and earned a merit for show exhibition along with a lot of other photographs from some of the best photographers in Maryland. My image didn't quite meet the judges standards for size, presentation, mounting, and lighting. However; I take great pride in the merit and a few comments by casual viewers. Some though it was the best photo in the display exhibition. Just a note - prints made for competition aren't normally the prints that clients buy or those that regular viewers appreciate. I have to learn more about the PPA judging game and start shooting images for competion besides shooting just for clients and for myself.

Enigmatic Elegance

One of the neat little things I learned was about lightness perception explained with an illustration of the Koffka Ring. Gray is a standard used in photography for exposure control and is the most predominant shade in black and white photography. Click here for a short demo of when the same shade of gray can be seen as a different shade of gray.