Portrait lighting course

Today I attended an all day workshop on portrait lighting at a studio in Wimbledon. It was run by Jason Pierce-Williams, who has twice been a runner up in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize which is exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery every year. It would be fair to say he is the first photographer I have met who I consider to be a true artist, in that he is not very commercially orientated and is rather just passionate about photography - he shoots on a 115 year old medium format camera (adapted with more modern lenses), mainly shoots in black and white, usually shoots using film and has two degrees in photography. His love for photography comes through when he talks, and he has an extensive knowledge of photography history and the great photographers - he knew all the famous photographs of the past century. He also loves street photography when he uses a digital Leica or Nikon Df, but the camera he loves using when on holiday is the classic Nikon FM2, that much loved photographer's camera from the 80's. It seems film cameras are still very much loved and in demand by many professional photographers today.

I finally got to understand lighting today. I have been on a lighting course before but came away not knowing fully how to control the light, and today the penny dropped. We had a model, the young Italian Giovanni, who was not professional and could barely speak English but he was superb for showing the different effects of the different lighting. We did not focus on composition or other aspects, today it was all about lighting.

Most of my shots of Giovanni are examples of the various types of lighting - Rembrandt, loop, butterfly etc. and Giovanni sat with a dead pan face so we could see the effect of the lighting on his face. However, I have decided to blip this slightly blurry shot of Giovanni when he was more relaxed and he was not posing for a lighting shot. He has compelling eyes I thought.