Please consider this a "preliminary" announcement of our weekly assignments for the weeks of 18 - 24 October and 25 - 31 October 2010. This is such an important topic that I've decided it deserves two weeks.
I've been wanting to do an assignment on portraits for quite some time, but haven't felt prepared to post a "tutorial" on the assignment. I don't consider myself to be a good portrait photographer, but I hope to be someday.
So why choose these two weeks for the "portrait" assignment? Well, in less than a week, we will be traveling up to Wisconsin for my nephew's wedding, and we're the "official" photographers (our wedding present to the couple). I've been spending what little spare time I have learning as much as I can about portrait photography. Photographing a wedding is, after all, a wonderful opportunity to photograph 1,000 different portraits all in one day!
We've photographed weddings before, and I'm sure we will do a good job, but I want to use this opportunity to push myself to become a better portrait photographer. I don't want to just produce the "standard" wedding portfolio, but hope to produce a few outstanding portraits in the process. So I've been studying. Mostly I've gone back time and time again to Chuck Gardner's excellent tutorials dealing with portrait photography. Most of his tutorials that apply to portrait photography are under the "Holistic Lighting Concepts" on his website here:
http://super.nova.org/DPR/#Lighting If you are interested in producing better portraits, I'd recommend you read the tutorials in that section, several times if needed.
So that's your assignment (and mine) for the next two weeks. Read the tutorials in the "Holistic Lighting Concepts" section on Chuck Gardner's website, then go out and practice these concepts. Post a few of your images in the "Portraits" album in the weekly assignments category of the gallery, and tell us what you have learned in the process.
Please upload your images to the "Portraits" album in the gallery no-later-than midnight, Mountain time (GMT - 07:00) on Sunday, 31 October 2010.
I'll look forward to seeing your images.
Keith
