Continued Non-Professional Development

Sunday 9th November was the date of Wilkinson Digital Splash 2014 in Preston, to which I went along, having enjoyed the seminar and presentation I attended last year. Having moved to a bigger better venue, this year the headline speaker was acclaimed landscape shooter Colin Prior. I booked onto his lecture/slideshow mainly because, having heard of him and knowing he was something of a famous name in photography in the UK (there aren't many household names in photography but Colin's probably among those closest to being able to claim that) I figured he would have some inspirational content and images, as was the case with Charlie Waite last year. Similar to last year though I also booked a seminar with someone less well known who was presenting something I'm interested in. Last year that was Lancashire and Cheshire wedding photographer Lisa Aldersley. This year it was Andrea Denniss, talking about the anatomy or the story of a portrait shoot, as it is in her world. I actually find these smaller sessions much more likely to drive my photography in a new direction than the bigger lectures, which is largely the point of this post. If you get chance it's worth listening to someone who does what you're already interested in, and the nature of these events is such that the speakers will tend to be pretty passionate, or they wouldn't be at the front of the room with their pictures on the screen in the first place.

Don't get me wrong,  Colin's lecture and slideshow was great. He talked about his various projects and showed some amazing shots. The only slight stress factor was the overrun - I booked Colin at 11am, and Andrea Denniss at 12:30pm, and assumed that there would be a 15-30 minute gap between the two where I could throw a couple of sandwiches down my neck before heading to the second venue, but at 12:29 when Colin was showing us all the books etc he has available at the moment, I finally decided I had to get to the other presentation (better to miss the sales-pitch end of one than the beginning of the other) and sneaked out as quietly as I could. Galloping across the UCLan Foster building campus I made it to the seminar room where Andrea was presenting, with mere seconds to spare, and squeezed in past all the earlier arrivers who were all sitting oddly close to the door, leaving the other side empty. Andrea started her presentation, then all the people who stayed with Colin to the end appeared and rather than similarly squeezing in, they all gathered chairs and stayed by the door, at which point the seminar proper began.

A selection of shots by Andrea Denniss of Pink Lily Photography

Now Andrea has a number of hats (in the figurative sense - she wasn't dressed like Danny Two-Hats from My Mad Fat Diary) being as she is a portrait and lifestyle photographer (she owns Pink Lily Photography) working to commission, and also a photography trainer for Aspire. I've included a montage of shots provided by Andrea above. (It's included at its original resolution to show it in its full glory, despite the odd shape that it leaves this post.) Andrea showed a slideshow of some of her work to give us a feel for the style, and then began to talk, and the thing that's immediately really obvious with Andrea other than her talent for creating beautiful portraits, is her passion for the craft and the business. For me this is the reason to attend these things - even if you're not necessarily into the style that someone does (not the case here - she had some lovely shots and I consider portraiture my favourite side of the hobby, though subjects are generally trickier to find, if not as hard to get to as the top of a mountain) listening to someone who really cares about it can make you care more about it too. It's left me wanting to shoot outdoor portraits in Autumn so I'm going to try (quickly...) to do that. It also got me thinking about training. I've wanted to learn how to pose group shots for ages and when Andrea decided to turn pro she took a number of training courses in photography. This lead on to talking about Aspire photography training for whom she works as a trainer, and the fact that they have a specific posing workshop day - exactly what I want. Accordingly, after the session Andrea tried to take me to meet the owner of Aspire photography training, Catherine Connor. Finding nobody in the room she gave me a card and said that Catherine was around the event somewhere so I headed back over to the trade stalls side to look for the Aspire stand, that I'd not seen earlier when wandering round unnecessarily spending money. (Hahnel Tuff-TTL Wireless TTL flash trigger and receiver - £90).

I found the Aspire stand and waited to chat to the lady manning the desk  (that sounds odd. A lady manning a stall - would she not be ladying it?) and handing out the leaflets etc. A short chat lead me to surmise (correctly) that this was the aforementioned Ms Connor and after taking my details and adding me to the mailing list, she mentioned in passing that she had another presentation in an hour. I'd intended to hang around until after the Andrea Denniss seminar which I had assumed would end at 13:30 but it actually continued unnoticed (time flies...) until around 14:00. This was followed by a chat between Andrea, another delegate and myself for another 20 minutes or so, then Andrea and I went to find Catherine and failed. As such I was already at the event much later than planned, so returning to reception I bought one of the last two tickets for Catherine's talk, which I assumed was about training but was actually about making the step from amateur to professional. Not being in this bracket you'd think this was of little use to someone such as myself, but again someone who really cares about their topic is usually interesting to listen to, and Catherine is definitely one of these.

I came away from this seminar full of ideas and inspiration to improve this blog, publicise my flickr, maybe even join Pinterest. I have no plans to go pro, but I do like it when people know what I do and what I'm good at, and I love doing shoots with people. I've not done one for a while so I definitely feel somewhat out of practice at people shots. In the past I've done a couple of individual shoots and one or two mini shoots (just a few shots for whatever purpose) plus two pretty planned 'group' shoots (each of which only included two people) and one family shoot in a park, and where I always feel that I fall down is in arranging them to look comfortable and interesting. As such I was very happy to receive two emails today from Aspire, one inviting me to an open day which I definitely plan to attend if I can, and one specifically addressing my interests as recorded yesterday, and describing the posing workshop course next February, which is partially taught by Andrea Denniss.

If I go on the posing workshop as I intend to, and I enjoy it as I expect to, I can already see that photography training might become (another) expensive new pastime. I suppose it's cheaper than track days and pilot lessons...

I seem to have strayed from the point slightly, which is that in my opinion, when you're looking for ideas or inspiration, one of the best places is to get it directly from those who already do what you want to do. If you get chance to attend events like this and you haven't been to them before I'd highly recommend them.

I was going to liberally scatter images through this post but as it's all about other people's photography I thought my own shots wouldn't really make sense, so apologies that it's somewhat text heavy. I'll see whether I can find something appropriate and add it.

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Try to learn something about everything and everything about something. Thomas Huxley