It’s something that’s been in the works for a long time now, ever since the last time I did one of the Photographing Consciously workshops, a hands on experience workshop on the topic of photographing people outdoors, using the natural environment for backdrop and coping with whatever natural light is available. So after a whole lot of planning I put together a set of notions that are vital for outdoor photography, put them in a PDF and gathered a bunch of camera loving folk for an awesome good time.

The notes in PDF format, downloadable here.

If you read through the slides, and once again they are available for direct PDF download as well (see link above), you’ll get a pretty good idea about what material we covered; as for the actual experience, the images below will help you relate to the events of the day.

It was really nice to have a group of people together, again, and disect the intricacies of photography. Initially the volunteer model that was supposed to come out had cancelled on us two days before the date …and that was a little bit on the stressful side for me to be honest, but in the end we ended up with four volunteer models and fabulus weather. Well …perhaps a little too much in terms of the sunshine, but even that was a great oportunity to learn how to deal with it and compensate for it. And of course, a good cup of coffee from DVLB Cafe in Waterloo, made for a near-perfect experience.

If you like what you saw and would like to be part of the next natural light portraits workshop, contact me via e-mail, or facebook or twitter and I’ll keep you up to date. Also stay tuned for the followup processing workshop that I’ll do soon on the topic of colour curves.