Downtown

Digital Days Photo Workshop review

On Sunday 15th of February i was lucky enough to get invited to the Sony Digital Days Photography 2 day course that we mentioned on here a couple of weeks ago. Day one on Saturday which ran from 1pm to 5pm covered mainly the basics of using your SLR and touched on other subject matter such as taking better pictures and using software in your work flow. Saturday i did not attend so am unable to do a write up on, Sunday however I was able to attend and hence forth my review is from then.

The day started at 9am in which we all got seated in one of the Conference rooms of the Sheraton Downtown Los Angeles. From then until 10.30am a rather bubbly Leslie Fisher proceeded into her segment. Leslie has had past experience working for Apple and Adobe so we had confidence in her expertise and knowledge right from the start, after briefly going over the previous days events Leslie talked about using available light, good composition and framing, subject and color. The talk was very informative and highlighted some key areas for myself as a photographer that needed working on. The whole morning session was accompanied by a slide show and we were given some great examples of the different camera functions at work, ie – AV/TV modes, P/ISO, exposure correction and using the all powerful Manual mode. All the time Leslie was descriptive in her explanations and made things easy to understand.

After Leslie finished we had a quick break and were ushered into another conference room with 3 different shooting stations laid out all with professional lighting and four willing models that so graciously allowed 80 different budding photographers to take photos of them. For many im sure this was the highlight of the morning as it was here we were allowed to put everything we learned so far to the test. The two model stations featured some attractive young ladies who quite happily posed for us and took direction, rotating every so often to allow them a change of clothes and different backdrop, props etc. on the other end we had a juggler who was throwing various objects into the air and allowed for the people shooting to try thier hand at freezing motion and blurring the objects being thrown. This for me was the first time i had been in a model enviroment and controlled lighting situation so i was able to try out my portrait techniques and my interpretations on composition quite freely. As there were 80 people over 3 stations things got a litlte busy but for the most part people were very mindful of others and allowed everyone to get in there and get some good images. At 1pm we stopped for lunch and anyone wishing to get some critique of thier work was able to hand thier memory cards in and would be examined by the next instructor whilst everyone else stepped out to eat.

Coming back from lunch at 1.30pm professional photographer John Omvik took over. John is a seasoned pro with over 15 years in the field, he has worked for camera and accessory companies such as Sandisk. Over the next 30 minutes John would go over some examples of what some of the course attendants had taken and gave examples of where they had gone wrong and what could be done to improve and rectify thier images. From then until 5pm John would dim the lights and hook his Macbook up to the projector and take us on his tour of how to improve our photography and optimize our workflows after shooting. John gave some great examples and advice on which software to use, computer specifics like how much RAM, Processors and everything else that will make a photographers life easier once in the editing phase.

For the final hour and a half John would go into Adobe Lightroom very indepth and give us his workflow and examples of situations that photographers would find once editing and how to get the best results from the software. As a Lightroom user myself this is where i learned the most, John took us through the whole gamut with indepth explanations on white balance, correcting exposure and how to get the best out of the image. Contrast, Saturation, cropping, selective correction and noise removal were all done in some detail.  The final minutes of the day were devoted to how to prepare for the next shoot, what is involved, such as cleaning and checking gear, baseline settings and other important stuff.

All in all the whole day was very informative. Leslie and John were both very professional not just in thier knowledge but how they got that information accross to the attendee’s, questions came throughout the day from people and both instructors were able to answer all promptly and with great expertise. As the event was sponsored by Sony there was a nice selection of the Sony DSLR line on hand for anyone to try and purchase if they required, Samy’s camera had a table there also with items on display and brochures of photo equipment to browse through. This was a great course for a day and half and I strongly advise anyone who is learning digital photography or needs a brush up on their knowledge to see these guys when there next in town.

Unfortunatly you have missed the LA one for this year but theres still workshops coming up in California in the future -

April 4th and 5th – Palm Springs
April 25th and 26th – San Francisco

For more details on upcoming events and workshop details please visit the website at http://www.digitaldaysphoto.com/

Special thanks to Athos Kyriakides for inviting me to this event.
All images in this post are copyright Graham Gilmore – Firesuite.com 2009

Tags: athos Kyriakides, Digital Days, john omvik, leslie fisher, los angeles, sheraton hotel, sony, workshop