Beginners Photography Course-week 1 ric woods photography

WE know, Visual people need visual examples...

Happy group...all survived week 1

Natural Light Photography Course-Next One in November 2010

Maree and myself get a real buzz when participants in our photography course get that fantastic smile as the "penny drops" and the theory and the practical all fall into place.

This what happened for our latest group in our recent Natural Light Photography Course. The standard of their shots immediately improved as they put into place some tips and tricks during the course

Maree is putting together the 2011 courses now.There are some exciting editions that people have been requesting such as Studio Lighting where we will teach you how to get professional results with the minimum of equipment.

More information is available from Maree Nichols maree@ricwoods.com. Don't miss out ,we are only running small groups.BOOK EARLY !!

THis years course booklet is HERE.

By the way we are still interviewing people for our Casual Juniors Postion, so if you know anyone that is KEEN and is interested in working in a full time professional photography studio please send the link to for the job information HERE

Little Lights-Big Results

The second Little Lights-Big Results workshop went off really well with the strobes and gels rarely getting cool. Amy our subject was fantastic and her red hair produced great images for the participants.

Below Maree is holding a magenta gelled strobe to light Amy from camera right whilst the brolly is wearing 1.5 CTO gels to compensate for the tungsten in-camera WB.The backdrop is lit with bare strobes...hence the blue cast.SB600 camera right and left, SB26 on background camera right and left.

We will be running more seminars in the new years with various topics, including natural light portraiture,night street portraiture, post production and work flow topics.If there is something your interested in let us know. enquiries@ricwoods.com.

ABOVE: Myself and Amy demonstrating lens selection ,depth of field and light fall off.

BELOW:A demonstration to show balance of strobe out put to illuminate Amy at F10 and a shutter speed of 1 second to capture the 15w globe in the lamp.Amy's face illuminated by Maree with small tungsten torch ( to balance the lamp)

LOCATION PORTRIATURE- a class I'm running at ProAm Photo Lab

These are a few of the images were by the participants of a workshop I'm running that was arranged by David Barnes the owner of Pro Am a film lab at Adamstown ( nsw australia)

This was the third night of the 5 sessions and I decided to take the group outside to use some off camera strobes and gels. The previous week we were shooting inside ProAm and the group had a great time with Maree ( my prod mgr/second photographer/very often photography subject). Everyone was very quick to learn how easy it can be to create beautiful light with good exposures and lighting ratios.

I demonstrated how long it takes to set up a scene using 4 strobes and how the strobes are fired by pocket wizards. I have 6 of these and this was great as it enabled me to have 2 students shooting at a time. This is easy on the recycle time for the strobes.

I have 10 + Maree in the group and its fantastic to have people so eager to learn...for me it doesn't get much better.

I used this lane way beside ProAm to demonstrate how easy it is to find and interesting shoot location when you sculpting with light.

The focus was to create not only interesting images to to use it to demonstrate how to direct the subjects, pre visualise the image, synchronise the action and the camera...Here Maree is the victim of some crazy stalker (me)

...then Maree found a bag snatcher...

Below, this is a great double page spread...I can see almost see bold text running down the right side of this image...

The group learnt how to drop the ambient light right down but retain detail

Then the paparazzi became to victim of an unwilling subject.

We then turned around and lit the wall behind us for another completely new scene and tone...

Maree as always gave plenty of great subject matter....

I really liked some of the images captured by those waiting to shoot with the radio triggers

We even kidnapped "the Pizza Guy" for a few of the images.....

I'm looking forward to the next session .We will shoot some inside portraits and Ill show them my post production tips. If your interested in participating in Location Portraiture Workshops shoot me an email enquiries@ricwoods.com