Well, it's the day after The Socieities Of Photographers Convention in London.  What a blast! 

Judging, laughing, making friends, presenting workshops, representing Elinchrom Lighting and Evoto Ai, learning, exploring, creating and very little sleeping! The Convention is quite something to be a part of!

In this episode, I try and explain what it feels like to be a small part of it whether judging the print competition, presenting or mixing with the trade - the various stages I pretty much always go through from fear to elation and everything in between.

Enjoy!

Cheers
P.

---

If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

 

Transcript

Introduction and Post-Convention Exhaustion

So late last night, we returned from the societies of photographers convention in London, and you can hear him. My voice. I'm exhausted. The convention is such an incredible thing. 3 4, 5 days. Of mixing with the trade running workshops, attending workshops. And one of the most important print competitions in the industry, and that is anywhere. In the world, it's been a blast. You can hear just how tired I am.

But in this episode I thought I'd battled through the fatigue and talk to what it's like to be a judge, a presenter, and a delegate. At this incredible convention firsthand. I'm Paul, and this is a slightly weary. Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast.

Well, hello, one and all. I hope you're all. Well, it's been a busy store to January.

If I'm honest. Uh, we were hectic all the way up to the convention. And even today, the day after it's all over, I've just been photographing a family.

Roles and Responsibilities at the Convention

Uh, this year at the convention, um, I was a print judge, a presenter, and an ambassador for Elinchrom Lighting. Uh, the company that I just adore using their products.

And so to everybody who I've met, everybody, I've talked to everybody who I've laughed with, shared a drink with shared an idea with. Maybe argued over print score with thank you. Thank you for making the Convention such a pleasure. However, as I was sitting on the train coming home, it struck me. That there are definitely stages stages to how you feel. When, at least in the role I have. Uh, your attending. The convention.

The Nine Stages of Convention Experience

Um, sort of like the five stages of grief, I suppose these are the nine stages that I go through each and every time I attend the convention.

It's the thought processes, it's the things that make me tick. Uh, it's how I feel. It's how I feel before is how I feel through it, doing it in this, how I feel afterwards. So let me step through them. Um, as usually when I come to the end of a judging process, I'll talk to all of the things I heard during the judging and give tips on producing. Uh, competition level prints, but I've done that so many times, this year, I just thought I go through the emotions, the various stages. Did I feel every time. Um, I attend the convention.

Stage 1: Excitement

So let's start with the obvious stage one. Excitement.

This kicks in the minute that, uh, the convention confirm. That you're going to be attending. They confirm that you're going to be running some talks. They confirm that you're going to be a judge.

Um, there's a real kick, a real thrill when that comes in. And then you start to think about what you'll do you start to, you've already had to put some ideas in, so those are going to be the titles of the talks, but you start to really plan out what that might look like, and that's six months out. We will start to put in, um, our applications for the 2026 convention in the next few months.

So you have big ideas. You clear the diary. Of course, you make sure that those dates are available. And at that stage, there is nothing more than excitement. Obviously a little bit of pressure to get some social media out and tell the world you're going, but it's all about the excitement. And then you roll up closer and closer and closer to the day.

And you're sitting on the train, heading into London, stage two.

Stage 2: Nerves

Nerves.

I don't know if everybody goes through this. But I do. I start to worry that I've got all of the kit. I need that. I've got enough of a plan of what the workshops and presentations are going to be. I start to worry about that moment you walk into a room full of people that for some reason, in my mind, I assume I'm not going to know.

Of course it's never like that, but that's how it feels. Um, also there's a really important to this year. It was a three o'clock deadline, you have to be in the judges room by three o'clock. Don't turn up. You're not judging and that's an Intuit. You have to be at the judges. Briefing. Meeting. And Terry Jones from the societies, she will talk through all of us as judges as to what she's expecting, how are we going to be. Uh, scheduled, what the runtimes are, what sort of language it's, uh, just an update and refresh on a language we're going to use how it's going to work.

And if we're not in that room, You're not judging. And of course, the bit where I get the most nervous is as I walk in now I'm an extrovert. I love being in a crowd of people, but I've always had this fear of walking into a crowded room and not knowing anyone and having to sit in a corner. Uh, sort of minding my own business, finding people to talk to not being certain of myself.

Now, luckily for me these days, I've been in the industry for so long that I know probably two thirds of the people in the room. Um, so it's not as bad as it used to be, but I used to be terrified and I'm still nervous. I'm still trepidatious. I'm still uncertain of myself. Um, but I walked in this year and of course it was just brilliant.

And that brings me on to, I think, Uh, stage number three.

Stage 3: Sense of Belonging

A sense of belonging,

a sense of being part of the family. There were so many hellos and handshakes and hugs and laughter and faces. I recognize some, I don't. I was introduced to new people. There's just this wonderful sense of coming back home.

I love the convention for that. Of all the things that it brings, I think to all photographers. There's a sense of being part of something bigger. I think there are about 50, maybe 60 judges in the room, plus the print and handlers and all of the teams around us. And it is the most incredible feeling of belonging and for the next sort of 12 hours or so, um, after the briefing, there'll be socializing some food, um, maybe have a drink with a few people.

It's a real sense of family. But then we come on to stage four.

Stage 4: Pressure of Judging

We're walking in to begin the process of judging the next morning. So this is the premier print competition in the world. So stage four is pressure.

And even though I've been doing this a long time, I've been a judge. I can't remember how many years it is now. Probably 15 years. Um, there's still this sense. Of responsibility. Because each and every print, we will see hundreds of prints. But every single print is unique to the author.

Every author has put everything they have into it. And trust me, you do not enter a print unless you think it stands a chance of winning? You might not say that to people you might say, oh, I don't know. I just thought he might try my arm, but you haven't entered a print. You haven't paid for it to be printed mounted and then the entry fees. For you not to think it stands a chance of winning.

And as a judge, you really do feel that sort of pressure. You feel the responsibility as you sit there, the print comes up and you have to go through all of the elements, the 10 elements that were giving us, given us judges. Um, Um, on which to base our assessment and ultimately a score.

And there are five judges on every panel. And these are some of the best. Photographers in the world. So if you put in a score and it comes on the screen, And you're wildly different to the other judges. Of course you feel that moment? Have I got that wrong? And there's a process for this as the challenge process. Um, and each of us know how to do it.

Each of us have our own particular way of doing it. Uh, I had to run a few challenges this year. Um, and you're looking at the scores and there was one in particular where it was quite a long way out of line with the other judges, my school was higher and I'd seen things in that image that at least based on my assessment of it, my experience warranted a higher score. And every judge by the way has had exactly this happened to them.

This is not just me. But I'm sitting there looking at the scores and I'm thinking. How hard have I got to work to try and get the other judges to see what I see, to feel what I feel, to evaluate the image in a similar way to me, or at least come closer to where I am. And these are photographers that some of them I've never met before.

Some of whom I have met before everyone has their own style and their own way, but you then have to talk to the image and talk to the other judges. And see if you can convince them. That possibly there are things in the image that this time round, they may have missed that you, um, have seen. It goes the other way as well, by the way.

So if somebody else puts in a score and minds lower. The same process will happen. But now it's me trying to listen, trying to understand where maybe I've missed some key factors in an image and that's particularly important when images come up, that aren't in your wheelhouse things that you don't specialize in when it comes to portraiture and weddings, or maybe photographing dogs. I of course know what I'm looking at.

I understand that process really well. That doesn't mean I will always have seen everything, but it does mean that probably I'm in the right ballpark, but sometimes you get an image that challenges you tries, you tests you, it forces you to think in a different way. And while I might understand the print process, I'll understand the creation process, I'll understand the presentation, there may be things about that moment or about that imagery or about that style of photography that I might have missed. And so I'm eagerly listening to the other judges to see if it's something where I've just mostly get my score a little bit out and I need to be. Um, come a little bit closer to the overall score that's been, uh, the first round score that's been calculated or maybe just maybe I'll hold my ground and say no. I hear you. I understand what you're saying completely, I just feel for these reasons I've got my score about, right.

So can you imagine the pressure when you raise a challenge or you're involved in a challenge with really well-known photographers from all corners of the world, um, the pressure is immense. It really is at that moment, the most important job in the world. And on top of that, we've got a live audience.

So it's not even just that you're having to do. Um, or having to think on your feet and figure out your scoring, but you also then have to articulate that in a way that is clear. It's polite. It's respectful to the print, new author and the rest of your judges, but it's also educational, interesting entertaining, maybe because to hold an audience in the room, as judges we have, not just the responsibility. Of creating the right scores or appropriate scores for the images and bear in mind. Bear in mind, if you have a different judge on a different day, the chances are you going to get a slightly different score?

So don't think that these are absolute objective. We feel all the time, the pressure of that. But during that process, we are also for the people in the room, entertainment. With air to be interesting, as well as educational we're there to help them understand, but also for them not to be asleep. In the room, the rooms are pretty dark because of course we've got the prince lit at the front. Um, We have a microphone, but our backs are to the audience.

And somehow we have to be not only knowledgeable and skilled and respectful, but also to a degree entertaining. There's a lot of pressure on it. And it's not just the pressure of judging the prints because of course. Um, for me and most of the judges. I was also running two workshops or two masterclasses, and doing presentations on the Ellen Crum lighting stage.

So during the rest of the convention, even once the judging is done. I'm still feeling a huge amount of pressure to be the very best I can be to represent Elinchrom and the brand, to the best of my ability. And again, that's part education, but mostly entertainment. If you're stood on the stage, creating pictures, it's not really about the technicals, that techniques, that care moonlighting modifies.

It's really about being interesting and entertaining and giving people things. To go home and try themselves. And the workshops are almost exactly the same, just on a much longer format. So you really do feel the pressure to make sure everything's working, and when the audience are in there, that you give the very, very best of yourself.

Even yesterday, I had what we euphamistically called the graveyard shift, which is the last set of presentations, not just of the day, but of the whole convention. The trade show by now is closed. There's nowhere else for delegates to go, except home. And nearly everybody you speak to is like, right.

It shows done. I'm going to go catch my train. So you rock up to a room and I had, for the final session, I had the biggest workshop room. There is, um, I don't know how many people it can hold. But I was expecting two or three people to stay behind, maybe. Uh, we've got the last, uh, workshop I ran. This year was on high-key and low-key, uh, studio lighting, um, and going through the process of how you think about these things, how you evaluate. Um, the person in front of you, how you react to them, how you decide what you're going to shoot and how you then go through the stages of shooting it. I'd put together. A pretty good idea. And I assumed I'd be presenting it to two or three people who are going to brave the last trains home and stick around, even though there's a gap after the trade show, closing and the workshop starting.

Well, the room was packed. It was an absolute thrill to be there. And the last few. Minutes or hour the hour and a half of the day, with a full room and incredible model. Uh, Eloise Hare was our model and playing with these beautiful Elinchrom lights and just showing different ideas and not just with a full room, but it's a room full of people who really interactive, really engaged.

And so thankfully all that pressure I'd felt throughout the five days. Uh, dissipated in the last workshop.

Stage 5: Elation

And of course at the end of that, you get to stage five, which is elation.

And that for me, at least a sort of celebration, um, uh, almost a euphoria. Um, I've been meeting people and I'm an extrovert, so being around people really recharges me. I've been talking sharp. I've been talking photography. I've been talking lighting. I've been catching up with people's businesses. And we've been creating images and I've just been feeling like I'm at home. These are my people. Every minute of every day, it's just a sense of recharging.

It's a sense of, um, joy and conversation. It has been absolutely brilliant. And that's that sense of elation and you close everything down. You finished your last presentation, you put everything into its bags and then you get to stage six, which for me.

Stage 6: Regret and Insecurity

Is sort of, I've called it regret. It's a sort of insecurity, a paranoia.

That's always been with me. I've never got rid of it, which is where I panic about all the things I've said that possibly I shouldn't have. The people I wished I'd had a chance to say hello to, but I only waived. Waved over a room. Um, You know, there are always people at the convention. I just would, I went there thinking I'm definitely going to see them.

And the closest I got was to wave at them across a bar maybe. And I regret not having had enough time to see everybody, but that isn't enough time to see everything or everybody. I regret that maybe. I didn't give the best to me. I've given everything I can every single moment, but there's still that slight insecurity that maybe I didn't quite get to everyone. And maybe of course my scores of the images were off.

Now, of course, when you're judging. You have a panel of five people, um, and that's there deliberately. That's there. To stop it, any outliers, really railroading and the show. And that's really, really good. It means that even if I'm one image, I scored it. S off slightly too high, a slightly too low. Maybe there are four other judges to make sure that that doesn't really matter, but you still worry about it.

You worry about whether when, um, the chair of judges is looking at you. Uh, whether the person who created the images, looking at you, or whether the people that run the competition are looking at you, they're thinking. Oh, Wilkinson's a bit off this year. Isn't it? You worry. And that's always part of this. Sort of coming down from the, all of the energy and the adrenaline. Um, and then the fatigue and the grief regret, start to really kick in.

And that leads us on to state seven.

Stage 7: Fatigue

The fatigue, the utter tiredness.

And you can hear that. in my voice. I can hear that in my voice and it kind of speaks for itself. Um, I got home, I think at about 10 o'clock last night, I was in bed by 11 I was asleep by five past. And Sarah myself. Woke up at about 11 o'clock this morning. I don't remember being quite so tired. I was so tired.

I am still so tired. And of course today I've had a family in the studio and I've had to go back to giving a hundred percent and all that meant is now I'm even more tired. The fatigue is part of it.

And yet that's not the whole story because there's also now beginning to, to kick in a sense of stage eight, which is opportunity.

Stage 8: Opportunity

I've made new friends, some incredible friends. Um, Chris and mark in particular. Uh, really made me laugh.

If they're listening, they'll know exactly who they are. Two monumental photographers from Australia, monumental creators, monumental. Um, intellects and I've loved sitting on the panel with them and listening and learning from them. It's refreshed existing friendships. It's refreshed all old friendships. Um, we've had new ideas, new thoughts. Um, new challenges, new things to think about new ideas for creativity.

And of course, being a judge, I get a double pronged chance at that. I get to not only mix with the most knowledgeable and in pressive photographers in the world, but also to see images, competition images up close and personal from some of the greatest. Um, talent's there to the people that have entered in. Not necessarily people I never get to meet by get to see their images. And that in itself gives you new ideas and new things to test you.

Today, in my family shoot, one of the four people, it turned out through chatting with them that they heavily into steam punk. I did not know this what a brilliant idea. And she's quite keen to come and do some photography she's into cosplay, um, and steam punk. And she would like me to create some pictures for her too.

But that really is it a development of some of the images I've seen over the past four days.

And that leads me on to what I think is the final stage.

Stage 9: Energy and Optimism

And that's a sense of energy.

Now for me. I'm an extrovert. So being in this huge crowd energizes me on its own, but being in the judging, seeing these images, seeing these photographers, talking to the other, the other judges, um, just being in that space. Is energizing for me.

And there's enough energy out of the convention. Every January to last me a good six months it'll fade. Of course it'll fade. This is a tough industry, right? We all know that. 2024, I think was brutal. Um, I don't know if anybody feels the same way as me, but that's how it felt. We hit our numbers just about, um, our revenue figures, but of course, Our costs have gone up. And so we really had to battle. To, um, get the numbers in and get our clients in.

Um, 2024 is a year that I think on the whole I'm. I'm not glad it's gone. You should never, ever be glad that at the passing of time, but let's just say that 2025. Is a whole new year brand new, fresh. Um, full of opportunity, full of optimism. And the energy that I get out of the convention, having met all these incredible people will drive me for a good six months.

And that's really important. Uh, Sarah and I are about to spend. Seven weeks working for cruise company. Uh, around south America. So at the end of this month, um, we leave half the team running here. And myself and Sarah will go and, uh, travel abroad. Um, and so I need the energy. I need the optimism.

I'm going to need the drive because even though that is the opportunity of a lifetime to spend seven weeks traveling, including five days, uh, attending and working at the, um, Working on the cruise ship while it's docked at the Rio de Janeiro. Carnival is, um, just the opportunity of our lifetime. Um, but I'm going to need every bit of energy I can find because we've had to clear the diary for those seven weeks or at least reduce the amount of work in it and had to do an awful lot of work in the run up to it.

And I'll have to do an awful lot of work. Um, when we come back from it and particularly on the customer side, but also a Mastering Portrait Photography, still creating the videos and the articles. But that stage nine, is that sense? Of energy. And then before I know it, it'll be back to the sense of excitement when we're trying to, um, get our talks and our workshops booked in for next year, 2026.

Conclusion and Gratitude

So to everybody who I've met, everybody who I've talked with, everybody who I've laughed with, it has been the most incredible five days.

The first two, I was on my own. And then Sarah thankfully joined me, um, for the, the, the end of it. As no fun. Sarah being though, when we're judging, we are literally down in the basement, um, judging for from nine o'clock. I did the one day we'd judged from nine o'clock, till seven o'clock in the evening, nine in the morning to seven in the evening. Um, it was the thrill of a lifetime, not just to be judging the rounds. Um, but this year I was one of the judges I'm looking after the final, final selection, um, which is such an honor.

But it was no fun for Sarah, if she was. L on our own. Um, and so she joined me for the last, uh, few days. Um, thank you to everybody that made it such a joy, made it such a thrill. Thank you to the Societies. And of course, in particular, To Terry Jones and her team on the competition side. But everybody on the trade show, everyone at Elinchrom. Everybody who I met every delegate, every single delegate, those of you that came and were quiet.

And didn't say word those of you who came constantly ask questions. Um, all of it. Just made me laugh too. The two models I worked with. Um, to Marissa and Eloise. Thank you for just being beautiful, not just photogenic, but beautiful as souls. Um, thank you to every single one of you. And on that happy note, it's a Sunday night.

Apparently I've got some cottage pie waiting for me back at home. So I'm going to round this. round this. podcast off, and wish you all well for the coming year. And I hope. I hope. you're as energized as I am for the coming 12 months. Take it easy and whatever else be kind to yourself. Take care.

So after three days of judging images for the British Institute Of Professional Photographers, it's time for me to step down from my role as Chair Of Awards And Qualifications.  I have been in the role for three years and it is time for someone else to pick up the reins and run with it (if that isn't a mixed metaphor.)

I have loved doing this and if it weren't for a million things I have to go on and do, I think I would do it forever!  So as I drive home from my last round of qualifications - possibly the best one I've ever been involved in - here are a few musings of things I have spotted.

This is a 'Tales From The Land Rover' edition so please forgive the audio quality and any mild road rage!

Enjoy!

 

Cheers
P.

---

If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

 

Transcript

EP158 Heading Home From The Awards

Introduction and Event Recap

[00:00:00] Paul In The Defender: So for those of you who love the Land Rover episodes, you'll be thrilled to hear that I'm just leaving the BIPP, the British Institute of Professional Photography Awards, uh, event 2024 25. Uh, why do we call it 2024 and 2025 is because if you get an award at the end of a year, it's a real pain from a marketing point of view if you can only say you have an award for 2024. So we call it 2024 slash 25, uh, just to extend the marketing value. So you're, you hold the titles for a year, , so why wouldn't we? Anyway, that's where I've been. I've just spent an absolute fortune on some fuel, uh, because I hadn't got a lot of choice but to fill up at a service station.

[00:00:47] And I am just pulling in to traffic. He says, concentrating on driving.

Driving and Multitasking

[00:00:52] Paul In The Defender: I had a lovely, uh, lovely email from someone this week. , sorry I'm driving so I can't, uh, look up your name. I'm so, I think it was John McCarthy. I'm gonna go with John McCarthy. , who said, amongst many other things, uh, he doesn't know how I drive and record a podcast at the same time.

[00:01:09] Well, the answer to that is I drive. And chat. Uh, there's not a lot of structure to it, , and a few people have said this week they like the podcast like that, uh, because, uh, they find it interesting to hear me ad libbing. I don't know whether that's, I don't know whether there's merit in that, but yeah, I am ad libbing because driving is the priority.

[00:01:30] They also said, uh, John said, I'm sure it's John McCarthy. I hope it is, if not, uh, I'm crediting somebody who's a fictional character. , he also said that uh, he can hear in everything we're talking about just how busy we are here at the studio. And it must be hard to find the time to fit in to do the podcast, and it is, which is why, uh, I am recording while driving.

[00:01:52] , but he did also go on to say, he loves it when we do them. Uh, they are really valuable. They don't just disappear out there into the ether. There are lots of you out there in the photographic community listening to, uh, hopefully enjoying, uh, at least to a, a greater or lesser degree, the podcast.

[00:02:10] So here we are. I'm Paul, and this is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast. Well, hello one and all. Uh, I am in relatively. Reasonably slow, fast ish, medium paced traffic, which is not good for me getting home quickly. I've got about an hour and a half of driving, but it is good from a road noise point of view 'cause at this speed, the road noise in my Land Rover isn't quite as, uh, intrusive as it would be. I see. It's not so much the road noise as the wind noise in this thing. I'm just looking at the other side of the motorway and thinking, I'm glad I'm not going that way 'cause it's must have been an accident.

[00:03:01] It's absolutely log jammed.

Reflections on a Photography Career

[00:03:04] Paul In The Defender: Uh, so what have I been up to? Well, it was the awards. It was the British Institute of Professional Photography International Awards yesterday in, uh, Bromsgrove, which is in Birmingham, in the Midlands, in the heart, in the heart of the country. Uh, an absolutely wonderful event.

[00:03:20] Lots of our friends and lots of colleagues, lots of photographers, uh, having a drink, having a laugh, and celebrating some of the very best images. That you can, uh, possibly imagine is absolutely brilliant. Uh, I have to say it's my last formal event as chair, uh, of qualifications and awards of the BIPP and I.

[00:03:41] I guess I have to just say a quick thank you, uh, to Martin Bains and the guys at the British Institute for asking me to take on the role. It has been the honor of a lifetime. You know, when you start out in photography, I, I was just a kid with a camera. Actually, to be fair, I still probably am, uh, just a kid with a camera.

[00:04:02] I've just grown quite a lot older and now earn my living from it. But the enthusiasm and the awe and wonder of what you can do with this gadget hasn't diminished at all in the time since I first picked one up at age, sort of, seven or eight or whatever age I was when my grandfather's, uh, Kodak Brownie.

[00:04:21] So to be. Chair of Quals And Awards for the oldest photographic association in the world has truly been the honor of a lifetime and when Martin asked me if I'd take that on three years ago, I think I might have been a bit reticent because I wasn't quite sure whether I could deliver what he needed, but hopefully we've gone on to answer the question.

[00:04:42] That was an emphatic yes and he, he and the board let me create a program and methods and standards That I think we can be really proud of. , and at the end of the, uh, sorry, at the beginning of the awards yesterday, so it's the end of my tenure. It's my last one as chair. So it is a, it is a sort of a bittersweet moment for me 'cause I've loved it.

[00:05:01] Uh, I'm only stepping down because I desperately need to find time to do a load of other things. And now is the time after three years, all the work we've done, uh, you know, on the, on the judging side for me, but particularly on Sarah. Putting in processes and making sure you can get judges when you need them.

[00:05:18] , so I'm gonna say thank you to Martin, thank you to the B-I-P-P-A huge thank you to Sarah. And thank you to all the judges who've judged with me, , who've been part of the team. , hopefully over the coming years I'll be able to stand back on the other side of the line and judge alongside the judges that for the past few years I've been sitting in front of while chairing.

Honorary Fellowship Award

[00:05:38] Paul In The Defender: , the other thing that happened last night, , so forgive me, this is a very personal. It's one of those things where I don't know quite how to do it, but I'm so chuffed I'm going to tell you anyway. I was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the BIPP. So, if you're not in the industry, I guess it's hard to articulate just how rare these things are and what an honor they are.

[00:06:04] There's only 26 or 27 Honorary Fellows in the industry. And as of now, I am also one. I already had my Fellowship. I got that in 2011. , Uh, but I now have an Honorary Fellowship, which is, it's been given to me. It's engraved on the thing is for services to the BIPP, which I rather like it. Uh, so it's just a real privilege to be given that, , I never, you know, just being chair of quals was to be honest, gratitude enough but it is still a lovely thing to be presented with. And that will carry with me for the rest of my life, you know. You keep that title, , and I'm so proud. I was so surprised and pleased last night and so proud now.

[00:06:50] But I must also just put out there that, although it is me because I'm the photographer, it's my letters. , actually, this particular one has to be 50 percent Sarah. It's Sarah that coordinated the judges. It's Sarah that managed things and runs me. It's Sarah that manages my time. It's Sarah, and even last night, several of the judges were telling me they were sad to see me step down, but actually, , it's Sarah they're really gonna miss.

[00:07:16] So, uh, this goes to Sarah more than anybody else. Uh, so that's a huge, huge thank you. Right, traffic's all braking. Good job I've left lots of gaps, that's nice. Right, so, what was today's topic?

Key Ingredient for Great Portraits

[00:07:31] Paul In The Defender: Today's topic is, , based on a question that a client asked me the other day. So I was photographing a beautiful family, mother, father, nine month old baby,

[00:07:42] The weather? Horribly unkind. It was cold and raining. Your perfect blend of the two types of weather that you don't really want to photograph a baby in. However, we did some studio work and the little girl possibly got a little warm and a little bit grouchy, and so we stepped outside just to see if we could get anything and it turned out, actually, just going out into the cool air, uh, sort of, she, completely cheered up so i think she might just have been a little bit warm or she just didn't like being in the environment of the studio i don't know which but out in the cool air so her mom's holding a huge umbrella over her she sat on one of my our doormats from the studio and scattered the front edge edge with leaves so it looks like the little girl is sitting in this beautiful sort of array of leaves but she's actually sitting on a dry mat in the middle of our lawn and beautiful light and of course when you have water around and Those sort of gloomy bluish tones from a cloudy sky actually the colors pop, you get these oranges and greens that are really interesting.

[00:08:45] So we got these incredible pictures and, and afterwards we're sitting chatting and it was the, it was my client, it was the dad said, so what is it? He said, what is it that makes, what's the, the one thing you have to have to make a great portrait? Ah, well, you know, you don't ask someone like me to talk about stuff like that, or at least you don't if you want a short answer.

[00:09:05] Uh, so of course the obvious answer, , I'm a lighting specialist. , I love portraiture, but I've always been fascinated by light, its qualities, its colour, the, the shadows that it creates, and I think light obviously is a key ingredient, and I think if you were being Purely pragmatic, you'd have to say the one thing you need to create a great photograph is light.

[00:09:31] There has to be light because without it, it's dark, and if it's dark, you've not got a picture. So, that's a really pragmatic answer, but it's a bit dull and a bit obvious. And as I'm a portrait photographer, and during that day, I was taking his baby's portrait, and I've taken their portraits before now. It got me on to think, what is it?

[00:09:48] What is that primal? Thing that absolutely makes a portrait. And I think it's a relationship. That is my answer. , it's the relationship you form. Oh man, we're in a rolling roadblock. , that's what's going on. , so there's a slow moving, uh, police car or two.

[00:10:06] At the front of, , this particular traffic jam, so we're now travelling at 10 miles an hour. Uh, if we, if we carry on travelling at 10 miles an hour, I'm assuming we won't, but if we do, uh, I'll still be travelling home tomorrow. It's going to take us a while. I'm going to assume up, up ahead, somewhere, they're having to clear an accident, and so all of the traffic, we're sitting straight behind, , a police vehicle.

[00:10:28] Anywho, uh, let's talk about the relationship. If you're creating portraits, the one ingredient that you cannot get away without to create a great portrait is a connection with your client.

[00:10:43] When you connect with your client, when you create that magic between you, , then something happens and yes, you need beautiful light, of course you do, but in that moment, that split second when they look down the lens and you, uh, fire the shutter, if you have some kind of connection with your client, people who see that picture later will feel it.

[00:11:08] It's a really subtle thing, but it's all about what happens when somebody else sees the picture. Because remember when you're holding a camera and you grab that shot. The ultimate consumer of the image isn't you. Yes, all right, you've got the camera, there's that moment, you can show the client if that's your particular workflow, , all of these things, but what you're doing is , you're going to show that image or the image is going to be shown by your client to somebody else.

[00:11:34] Normally, that's how it works.

[00:11:36] And if you've got that magical connection between you and the person in front of the camera, that connection seems to flow out to someone who views the image later. That's where the magic happens, and you really have to do it fast too. , when people come into our studio, we have an entire workflow that is based around getting our client to relax, getting them to feel comfortable.

[00:12:03] And we are starting to create a very temporary but very powerful relationship. It's not, it's not a love affair, but it is that sort of some kind of rapport. Where. You can have a conversation, you can laugh, you can maybe learn a little bit about someone, which is always lovely. And when you do that, when you pick up the camera, you, that sort of momentum of that relationship carries through.

[00:12:28] So if you tell 'em to look down the lens, it has a, a magic to it if you're tell, even if you're telling them to look slightly to the side or down, that still has a body language to it that feels comfortable. So for me and the kind of portraiture that I love, it's that. relationship that you build, that connection in the moment you hit the button, and that is the most important thing about a portrait, and it's beautiful.

[00:12:53] And I said this to my client, and I really hope he sort of thought, oh, okay, that's a, that's a, you know, useful answer. I don't know whether, , I think he might just be making chit chat, same, because it was, he's the client, and so that's the rapport, right? So instead of me asking the questions of it, he was asking questions, , of me.

[00:13:11] Anyway, there you go. Key ingredient other than light is a relationship, the connection with your sitter.

Masteringportraitphotography.com Launch

[00:13:19] Paul In The Defender: I know this is a short one as I'm pottling along, but I also wanted to take the opportunity in this podcast to formally, as much as, you know, anything is formal with me, to formally launch masteringportraitphotography.

[00:13:33] com. Now of course the website has been there for an eternity. It's been there pretty much ever since we launched the book. Actually on the book there might be some news coming, but I'll keep you posted if and when contracts get signed. , But the website's been there, it's had sort of content, but we've really only used it primarily for the podcast as its spiritual home.

[00:13:58] Yes, there's lots of articles, there've been tons of articles, , but we've never really used it as our first and foremost focus.

[00:14:14] Mastering Portrait Photography is now very much in our viewfinder, if you like, if you like the metaphor, and we are pushing a huge amount of energy and content into it. So every month there will be a long form video. By long form I mean half an hour. Video, uh, talking about something, uh, I think the ones that are up there at the moment, like I said, I'm in the Land Rover, and while I did make some notes, uh, prior to clipping on the microphone, I didn't make all of them, so I think there is how to structure a shoot is on there, uh, I think there is how to work in harsh sunlight in there, , I know the one that's on the editing screens at the moment is five ideas for off camera flash, oh, we're all speeding up again now.

[00:14:57] We're So it's about to get a little bit more background noise. They must have rescued whatever vehicle it was. , and so, uh, you get one long form video a month. There will also be an article a month, or every couple of weeks, with a lighting diagram. On top of that, there are the frame, room, whatever you want to call them, mock ups, where they are photorealistic Photoshop files that you can drop your own image into, and it just looks like that's how the image was put on a wall. Why do we do those? Well, originally it was to help sell, , wall art to our clients. Because obviously as a business, I need ways of getting them to visualize the, uh, the wall art that I'd like them to have. And the closer I can get it to photorealistic, the better it is.

[00:15:50] Because they'll, they can't touch it. Because. That we haven't made it yet. And the old adage in sales, if they can touch it, they'll buy it. , we can't quite get there, but we can certainly visualize it. So that's really good. , and that's why we built them. I built them for my own team and everything about the website, Mastering Portrait Photography.com is of and for us, I built it or we built it to support us as a business.

[00:16:17] The articles, some of it came out of the book, but then much of the rest of it. It's been to help train people, it's been to help train my own team when we've got assistants in, , the room mock ups or the art mock ups are entirely built for us. They were built for us to be able to improve our sales, and that works.

[00:16:38] Make no bones about it, they work. You can see them, there's hundreds of them, we're building more all the time, , Oh, this bit's bumpy. The thing about recording in a Land Rover is if the road, the M40, as it is, has a rubbish road surface, which it does at this particular bit, , then it gets a little bit shaky.

[00:16:56] You can hear everything rattling around. And so we built them to be photorealistic. We built them for us. There's tons of them, but there's actually a by product which I didn't necessarily anticipate. So while I'm building these things, I drop images into them all the time. I go back to my sort of stock of portfolio images, some of my favorite images, my favorite clients over the years.

[00:17:17] And I drop them in, , to create, , thumbnails that when you browse the site you can have a look at. , but actually what I've learned, or I'm learning as I go, is how different styles of image work in different types of frame. So certain images work great big on a wall. You know, I think as photographers We're drawn towards the idea of the Mona Lisa type portrait photograph, or at least I am.

[00:17:43] I love a headshot. I love a clean, big, bold, you know, almost as if it was an LP album cover. Uh, I think, you know, Bruce Springsteen or Peter Gabriel, that's I'm sure my age, I suppose, , on an album cover, something like that, I think would be just brilliant. But would my client really put that huge on their wall?

[00:18:04] Well, they might if it's Bruce Springsteen or Peter Gabriel. They're unlikely to if it's them. Now, they might if they have an only child and they might if it's a picture of a dog. There's some amazing photographers out there doing pet photography and I can, and certainly when we do it too, you know, I can visualize how one of our dog photographs, for instance, might appear in a big frame on a wall.

[00:18:28] I was with a client and an old friend of mine the other day and they had a A picture on the wall. It's one of Randall Ford's pictures. , and I know the family and their dogs and, and, uh, the dad. And I just think I could do exactly that with, uh, his dogs and his family. , something big and bold. A couple of frames lined up across the wall, but on the whole, if you are gonna sell big frames, single big frames, you probably want groups in there.

[00:18:56] Now, if you've got clients with huge walls and. You know, a couple of kids, you might be able to put individual headshots into individual frames on the wall, and I do have clients like that, and they look stunning, my oh my, do I love it. Uh, but they're not the norm, they're not the norm. The norm is a normal sized house, with moderate sized walls, and if you put a big frame up on the wall, it's either got to be something like a fine art piece, where, let's say, The couple are silhouetted against the wall, small, but there's a big sky or something, , or a picture of a dog, or a picture of, you know, the two kids, or the whole family.

[00:19:35] It's highly likely that they're going to want something full of joy and laughter, because that is something that would be appealing at that size on a wall. Similarly, if you're laying up three frames, you can tell a story across them. You can use a different star a different type of image. You can use individual shots in a different way.

[00:19:52] For more information visit www. paulwilkinsonphotography. com , if you put three acrylics on a wall, you can triptych across it, so you have one picture that's spread across the three acrylics, and that could look super creative, uh, really, really interesting way to do it, , and all of this, my understanding of this side of it is increasing all the time, because I'm laying out using these mock ups, so on top of them being brilliant as a sales tool for you and for your clients, they're also a really creative thing to play with, just trying different ideas, And seeing how they look.

[00:20:25] So that's the room mockups on the website. There's also, of course, the podcast, this very thing that you're listening to, that's the spiritual home for it. Even if you're listening to this on iTunes or on Spotify or on YouTube. The spiritual home for it is masteringportraitphotography.com.

Upcoming Workshops and Events

[00:20:43] Paul In The Defender: And then the final section, or the main section is the academy.

[00:20:47] And this is now where all of our workshops, , are going to be. So, uh, while I'm on that topic, I'll just reel off the workshops that we have already got, uh, to book in the diary. Now these have got, uh, people have already started booking on them, , we only put them up a week or two ago. Uh, so on January the 20th, January the 20th, we've got an Off Camera Flash Workshop.

[00:21:14] Uh, funnily enough, one of the toughest topics to teach, uh, but also one of the most rewarding techniques to learn. , so we did, uh, we are in the process of releasing a video on it that will go on, a long form video that will go onto the website, uh, and that is a deep dive into some ideas of what you can do with off camera flash.

[00:21:33] I think people are a bit afraid of it because it's, , a little bit technical, but once you get your head around it and what you can do with it, you can do anything from create really natural, almost available light portraits but with stunning light wherever you are all the way through to theatrical halloween images with smoke machines and all of the paraphernalia and they're all in this video and the workshop on january the 20th is going to cover that ground it's Off Camera Flash we may or may not include some continuous lighting but at the moment the plan is for it to be Off Camera Flash but if the delegates ask to also cover continuous light then we could do Some of that because of course every workshop we run we tune it to the delegates We tell you broadly what the topic is going to be and then through the feedback we get in the Early forms that you submit and we can tune it if you want to

[00:22:27] It's the joy of having a studio. I guess we can do anything we want to as long as everybody's happy with that on March the 31st, we have a Mastering Headshots Workshop, so As it says, it's all about headshot. It's all about, uh, the, uh, for me, I think one of the purest, most beautiful forms of portraiture. I love doing headshot. They're my favorite, uh, thing to do.

[00:22:51] I think it, I dunno why I, maybe it's 'cause I've always been fascinated with faces and a headshot is simply an excuse to photograph a face. So that's headshots on, uh, April the 14th. So the headshots is March the 31st, April the 14th. We have got dogs and owners. We're photographing dogs with their owners for a day.

[00:23:11] , Of course, during that we will take some pictures of the dogs on their own. We will also take some pictures of the owners on their own. But primarily it's targeted at how to photograph dogs in conjunction with their, uh, their owners. Why do we do that? Well, most of our clients would wish to have a shot with the dog.

[00:23:32] That's the best shot you can get. , not all, we have plenty of clients that just want the dog photographed, but we also have plenty of clients, one in particular of the day, brilliant, oh man, one of my favorite sessions, Vivienne, who has given me permission to talk about and show the shoots. Vivienne came with her dog Dodie, tiny little West Highland Terrier, who contrary to my Nan's West Highland Terrier that used to bite my toes, this dog was the best behaved dog in the world.

[00:23:59] PAULWILKINSONPHOTOGRAPHY. COM , followed her everywhere she went, but also would just wander off and get inquisitive and then immediately return. A beautiful dog, beautiful shots, and she booked us specifically for one thing. She said, I can find people who shoot their dog on their own, I can find plenty of portrait photographers, only one photographer came up who quite openly and on the website said, yeah, we can photograph a dog with their owner, and I do it all the time with the hearing dogs, why wouldn't I?

[00:24:25] , I think it's a really lovely thing, and the shots of her. They're off the top of the scale. So that is April the 14th, Dogs and Owners. Uh, and then, this is a completely new thing. On May the 12th and 13th, we we have a two day bootcamp Now what's a bootcamp? Well, basically, it's as much stuff as we can fit in over two days. And we get the chance in the evening to have some food, maybe have a drink, have a chat, be together as a group. , We don't have accommodation at the studio, uh, but we certainly have plenty around us. So that will be, uh, two days, , either at our studio or somewhere local.

[00:25:06] , depending on what we decide exactly where it'll be. But it will certainly be within a mile or two of, of where we are based two days. That's two days back to back a maximum of 10 people. So it's a few more than our normal. Uh, workshops, but it'll be pretty intense. We're gonna cover all sorts of ground, , using available light, using studio light, using off camera flash, maybe a bit of post production thrown into the mix, again, depending on what the delegates, the delegates would like to cover.

[00:25:34] It's gonna be an absolute blast, cannot wait for that one. It's the first time we've run it, , and it's such a smart idea, it's Sarah's idea to do it. , as always, the smart ideas come from Sarah, uh, and, uh, looking forward to that one. That's May 12th and 13th. And then the final one that's available at the moment, right now, is June the 9th.

[00:25:52] We are doing our regular jaunt, uh, we're gonna dance to the weather, see what we get, uh, on location in Oxford. Now this workshop, I think, might be, might be my favourite, because it's just me with a camera, with some people to photograph, on a location. That's it. We don't carry a load of kit, don't carry particularly reflectors and lights, we just go and find locations, find light pools and patches, find stories to tell.

[00:26:24] We just go and photograph our models in Oxford on location. So that's on June 9th. And all of these workshops are now home, housed, ha ha, can't even say it, are now located, let's try that, are now located on masteringportraitphotography. com. We've moved everything over because that was always what we were building with the workshops.

[00:26:50] , originally it was under Paul Wilkinson Photography, uh, but we always knew, , and had, and had a reasonably openly talked about this, Always knew that we'd be moving it across to Mastering Portrait Photography. 'cause that's the place that's all about learning, all about teaching, all about enjoying and exploring portrait photography.

[00:27:10] So if you go to mastering portrait photography.com, there's a, a section called the Academy. So there's all these sections. There's The Visual Vault, that's all of the articles. There's The Podcast, there's, uh, The Resources, which is, , the mockups and , tools, Photoshop downloads and things. And then there is the, uh, Academy.

[00:27:31] And this is where you'll find the workshops. Exactly the same booking process as before. Everything's as it was, it's just now hosed, ha ha ha, it's just now located on masteringportraitphotography. com. Now, for the articles and the videos and the mock ups, at the moment the mock ups are 9. 99 each, uh, which is already a bargain, there's a few free ones, just so you can get an idea, uh, so they're about a tenner each, , there's a few backgrounds, I'm working on building more backgrounds as I need them, but mostly it's the mock ups.

[00:28:02] So they're a tenner, which is a bargain, you can create them, you can put them in magazines, you can use them on your website. It just shows your prospective or your existing clients how their images might look. A tenner. Bargain. However, there's a bigger bargain. I suddenly sound like a salesman. So sorry, it's because I'm driving.

[00:28:21] And I want to give you not one, but two bargains. It sounds like that. Anyway, if you become a subscriber of Mastering Portrait Photography, you get access to the videos. , and you get access to the downloads. And you get access, well, to everything we put on there, except the workshops. We charge separately for those.

[00:28:39] But you get access to all of the resources for 6. 99 a month, which is an even bigger bargain. So even if you only want to download a few of the room mock ups, it's still better to keep a subscription going at 6. 99 a month. It's less than an expensive cup of coffee. And, uh, we will keep the mock ups coming, we will keep the articles coming, we will keep the videos coming, so you'll always have value for money for your 6.99. If you're feeling a bit more, you know, a bit, you have a bit more conviction, then it's 69 quid, or 69. 99 a year, so that's 12 months for the price of 10. Uh, 10 percent saving, or whatever that is, 2 out of 12. Is it a 10? Yeah, it's a 10 percent saving. Is it? No, it's not. It's, I don't know what it is. It's two twelfths.

[00:29:25] There you go. It's one sixth. No! Which is a great saving. My maths isn't good enough, uh, while I'm driving. I can't concentrate. I'm concentrating on the road, as I should be, by the way. Uh, so it's 6. 99 a month, , or 69. 99 per year. So head over to masteringportraitphotography. com, , and we promise, we promise we'll make it worth your while.

[00:29:48] Oh, sorry, all of our members also. Uh, you get access to our Facebook community. Which is hidden and private. You can't get onto it any other way. , only people who are part of our community can be in there. And that way people can ask for critiques. People can ask for advice and tips is where we put discount codes for things.

[00:30:07] , like software where we have, uh, access to discounts from suppliers, those kinds of things. They all go onto the Facebook community. I know a few of you aren't on Facebook, and if I'm honest, it's not my favorite thing. Because I'm just a dopamine idiot when it comes to social media. Once I'm on it, I can't get off it.

[00:30:26] , however, it's the best way to do this to be, so you don't have to log into multiple places to find information. It's on our Facebook community, uh, and most of us have a Facebook account. So you see the, , the alerts come up when things, uh, are uploaded. So that is masteringportraitphotography. com. If you want to find the workshops, Head across there and go to the academy.

[00:30:47] You can Google Mastering Portrait Photography Academy or mastering portrait photography workshops. , they're a little bit lower down the rankings at the moment because obviously I've spent my entire life saying just Google Paul Wilkinson Photography workshops and everyone heads over there. So, uh, you might just have to scroll down, uh, one or two line items and we'll be there.

[00:31:05] Uh, that will change more and more of you. Uh, search for it and click on the link. So search for mastering portrait photography workshops or Mastering Portrait Photography Academy and you will. Find us.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[00:31:15] Paul In The Defender: And that's it for me. The traffic is free flowing. There's cars going everywhere. The light is dimming.

[00:31:20] They're salting the roads. They must be expecting some cold weather. It's a beautiful, beautiful afternoon. It's been a wonderful evening of celebrating photography. I am thrilled, thrilled to bits that I've rounded off my three years with setting up the most incredible monthly photo competition and also, of course, the surprise and honor.

[00:31:46] So on that happy note, I hope you're all well, I hope things are treating you nicely, and until next time, whatever else, be kind to yourself. Take care. P. S. Sorry if this sounds a bit shouty, but when you're driving a Land Rover, it's really loud, and I forget that although I'm mic'd up, or I forget rather that because I'm mic'd up, it might sound weirdly, like I'm simply yelling!

[00:32:27] That's because I'm traveling at Sixty mile an hour in a Land Rover Defender, so apologies if I'm shouting. Be kind to yourself. Take care. Bye.

So after three days of judging images for the British Institute Of Professional Photographers, it's time for me to step down from my role as Chair Of Awards And Qualifications.  I have been in the role for three years and it is time for someone else to pick up the reins and run with it (if that isn't a mixed metaphor.)

I have loved doing this and if it weren't for a million things I have to go on and do, I think I would do it forever!  So as I drive home from my last round of qualifications - possibly the best one I've ever been involved in - here are a few musings of things I have spotted.

This is a 'Tales From The Land Rover' edition so please forgive the audio quality and any mild road rage!

Enjoy!

 

Cheers
P.

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If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

 

Transcript

EP157 - After The Judging

The Exhausting Journey Home

So I'm driving home from Birmingham, just in a service station, having bought the most expensive cup of coffee in the world, um, but I need one. It's been a long few days, um, and I am beyond exhausted.

Reflecting on Judging and Achievements

I've just been judging for the British Institute of Professional Photographers. I was there as chair of judges and quals for the last time, maybe not for the last time ever, but certainly for the last time, uh, in this current guise.,

it's been three years, I've done it for three years, and I need some time to be able to do some other things, it's nothing more than that, that's all I need, it's just to be able to do some other stuff, because we're building up Mastering Portrait Photography, which, by the way, we actually got another royalty statement through this week, um, for the book, ten years later, and the book is still .selling, I cannot believe it, uh, selling all over the world, and it's such an honor to have something out there that is still ticking over, you know, a few hundred copies, I'd say it might be more than that, but it's hundreds of copies, every year, around the world, it's still in print, after ten years, and while much of the book I would update now, it's still reasonably, uh, current, the pictures certainly stand up for themselves, as do the Uh, all of the notes.

I think the one thing I would change is the opening chapter, which is all about current cameras. And of course that's changed in 10 years. They're not at all like that. And that's kind of what we're doing. We're building this incredible website called Mastering Portrait Photography. That is what I always loved, which is images and explanations and diagrams and ideas.

And I have a bookshelf from floor to ceiling full of those kinds of books. So, it's time to stop judging for a moment, and I've just spent the past few days doing it. I'm on the M40 heading south. I'm Paul, and this, this is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast.

Well, wow, what a few days it has been, and what an honour and a privilege it's been to have the role of Chair of Qualifications and Awards for the world's oldest. Photographic society or association, um, just beyond belief that I was asked to step into that role and it saddens me to leave, particularly after these couple of days because it's been just the most exciting thing.

It's been absolutely wonderful, but I have to do it. We have to find a way of getting a little bit more time to do the other things that I need to get to. So.

Stepping Down from Chair of Judges

I've stepped down, I stepped down a few months ago and said I'd run it to the end of the year, so I've just finished the last set of qualifications that I'll be chairing, for now anyway, and the last annual printmasters competition.

I've got one more round of monthly images to, uh, chair the judging for, and then I am done for a little bit. So I'm not done judging, I'll still be judging both for the, sorry, for the BAPP, I'm sure. And for the Societies where I'm going to be in January, we're presenting again in January at the Societies Convention in London.

Um, I'm doing a couple of workshops, a couple of masterclasses, but I'm also going to be judging. I'm also leading the judging for the Click, uh, Click Light event, uh, sort of towards the end of next year. I already know that's in the diary. So it isn't that I'm stepping away from judging, it's just I'm stepping away from the role that I currently have at the moment.

Um, because it's just too time consuming, it's all I can do. Um, so what have the last few days, uh, been?

The Joy and Challenges of Judging

Well, we've judged hundreds of images, and I, it is, it's hundreds and hundreds of images. We've judged eleven panels, there are six judges. I chair a team, there's myself and six incredible photographers across all genres, um, of our art form.

commercialphotography, portraitphotography, weddingphotography, landscape, wildlife, you name it. Uh, this broad skillset in the judges, um, was in the room. Six just wonderful people, um, and it's that I think I'm gonna miss if I stop judging, of course. It's being in a room with these massive talents who make me laugh and inspire me every time we do it.

So we have judged 11 panels. of which five, uh, came out as a fellowship standard. That's the highest grade we can offer is fellowship. Fellowship at the British Institute of Professional Photography. I got my fellowship, uh, 2011, I think. I should know the dates to my own life, but I don't. Um, and I remember then wondering what, where that would take me.

What did it mean? And where it's taken me is to where I am right now. We've written a book. I've chaired all sorts of associations, I've chaired, I've been the Chair of Quals and Awards for the, um, for the British Institute of Professional Photographers. Um, I've travelled the world, I've worked on cruise ships, I, just, so much stuff has happened, and it's all thanks, or at least it was triggered, by me doing my quals.

Uh, so five fellowships, uh, three licentiates, um, three of the panels we saw of the eleven sadly were unsuccessful, um, but of the others, eight were successful, and a couple of those were uplifts, which means they came in at one grade, and they didn't just get the grade they came in for, um, they were deemed to be so good, they were uplifted to the next level, the next qualification, and they both came out at fellowships.

And I've had the chance to see and talk to the most wonderful photographers and their images. One panel in particular really just blew me away. And it's rare that I look at a panel and I wish I'd taken those images. There are panels where I love the images, but they're not really my field or it's just, you know, a different thing to what I do.

But this was a panel of portraits of artists and creatives and artisans, famous artisans, some of them unknown artists, others, and the way the work was presented, the way the author was so down to earth and humble about what he did, the way he'd captured characters in a moment in time, the way he'd styled each image in each studio, everything about these images just made me wish.

I had captured them and that's how it's left me. But what a way to leave, right? What a way to finish my tenure, um, after three years in the role. What a way to decide it's time, um, and although I'd taken the decision a few months ago that it was time for me to step away, I couldn't have foreseen that the last round of judging that I would chair like this would be simply the best couple of days of my time in the seat.

Absolutely. uh, amazing. So as I said, we've just judged the printmasters 2020. I don't know if I did say it or not. Obviously when I'm driving in the car, I'm on the motorway, uh, concentrating on the driving is my priority. Speaking into a microphone is very, very low down the list. Um, so of course I'm making it all up as I go along and trying to remember what I've said.

I have no idea. Did I tell you that, um, we've just been judging the printmasters as well as some qualifications? I've no idea. So that's what we've been doing two days, one day printmasters, another day. Quals, the print masters, hundreds of prints, hundreds and hundreds of prints.

Insights on Photography Competitions

So what have I learned over the two days?

Uh, well, let's sort of think of, uh, some things. Firstly, and this sounds obvious, but I'm in the same way that McDonald's print caution is coffee might be hot on the side of their coffee. It's such an obvious thing, yet people don't. So I'm telling some of the obvious things and yet people don't read the rules.

Start there. Whatever else you do, read them. Don't ignore them, because we will find out. We have had one image confirmed as being generated by AI. I doubt it's the last. We're gonna see more. The judges spotted there was something not quite right about it, so we dug in. Sure enough, AI. That's not to say there isn't AI we've missed.

AI now is so good that if it's presented to us, Unless we forensically check every file, I don't know what else we're supposed to do. Um, we spotted it, we got it checked, that's disqualified. There are others maybe in there, um, that have more than a smattering, um, of artificial intelligence involvement. But, you know, uh, the tools will get better and better and better at spotting it.

Um, and maybe it'll get to the point where in all competitions we have to ask to see The original RAW file, but even that, you know, you can fake a RAW file. So, what do you do? Uh, either way, absolutely brilliant. Um, also if it says it has to be a commissioned image, that does mean you can't use images from workshops.

Um, commissioned means you had a client who paid you to take the picture, that's what a commissioned image is. And of course, when images of models start popping up, this In a room with six of the most experienced photographers in the UK, there's always going to be one of them that's like, I know that model, I've seen those pictures, I know where that was taken, I know who took that.

Um, and so yeah, sure enough, we had to ring around a little bit and find out, um, whether some images were, um, within the rules, um, and the confirmation, uh, came through one way or the other. And of course, just read the rules. Uh, I say this every time I do one of these mop ups. Paper and mounts. Paper and mounts.

Paper and mounts. If you have any white paper showing of the printing paper, it's a good idea that the matte is either significantly different in colour to that paper, or is exactly the same as that paper. Um, one of my favourite, um, ways to mount an image, and there were quite a few we've seen over the past few days, The idea behind this was to have a white paper border around the print that sits then inside the mount.

So there's a gap between the edge of the actual ink on the paper and then the cut of the mount. It creates a really beautiful sense of space as it sits into the opening. But the paper needs to be the same colour as the mount. Otherwise it looks really weird. I suppose you could have a black mount and white paper.

Yeah, that would be fine. But a slightly off white mount and a pure blue white paper probably are not going to sit that comfortably, uh, together. So think about that. Think about how the whole image appears.

So what else?

The Importance of Mentorship

Well, good mentors matter. I might write a title. I might, might, maybe I should write a podcast on that and that alone. Good. Mentors matter. They really do. We can see the work coming through from great mentors. Um, because the panel is considered, the way it's laid out is considered, the image selection is considered, um, having somebody else's eyes on to help you step outside of yourself.

The problem is when you're looking at your own images is you are by definition attached to them. You can't get around it. That's the way it should be. You are attached to your own images, which means you're not looking at them objectively, or at least most of us can't look at them objectively. I'm sure there are photographers out there who profess that they can.

I can't. I need another pair of eyes on. I have a mentor, and having a mentor is utterly, utterly crucial. Um, someone who can not just cast their eye over what you're doing, but help and shape and guide, give you ideas, bounce stuff off of you. Someone, ideally, who you respect, that you think what they've created and maybe what they can drag out of you will just make you a better photographer.

That's your mentor's role. They don't have to necessarily be a better photographer, they have to be someone you respect. Um, so have a good mentor and talk to them. Being meant, I've said this, there's a podcast on this somewhere in my history. That being mentored, being a mentee is a skill in and of itself.

It's not just a case of a mentor telling you how to get better. It's you driving that, you asking for the right help. You listening to what a mentor tells, tells you, you deciding what from what they're advising, what to do with it. You won't do everything a mentor suggests because your mentor is them and you are you.

You know, unless your mentor is your twin or something, they're always going to tell you things that, well, I can see how that might work for you, but it probably isn't what I want to do for me. That's fine. That's completely fine. As long as it's a rational decision that you're going to do something slightly different.

It's not just, nah, can't be bothered because can't be bothered, got no one nowhere. So have a good mentor, listen to them, use them, drive it, uh, and, you know, It just, you can see it in the panels that came through where the mentor, the relationship with the mentor, uh, was incredibly, incredibly good.

Staying Current in Photography

The next thing I'm thinking of is be current.

And what do I mean by be current? Well, the trick, I think, is to love the world in which you work. Look at the art, look at the Tele, films, listen to the radio, be influenced by the world in which you work. Don't just, you know, it's the temptation always, I think, when you do things like fellowships, is to say, well, that's defined me, that's who I am.

And we see it sometimes in the work, and frankly, we see it sometimes in the judging, where, um, just because it's always been, So that's the way it always will be. And that's, that's, that's not a great way to be. I don't think, you know, mix with new photographers, new generations of photographers. If you're like I am just that little bit more experienced in the industry, you know, my influences now have to broaden into the younger market because that's not my natural fit.

So I've got to get out there and explore what's being created. On channels that maybe just maybe I wouldn't normally gravitate towards. You know, I can't say I am a TikTok king, um, but I do go on there. I do keep an eye on what's going on. I try to learn from it. Um, Insta, I have a big account on Insta, um, which right now is still reasonably current, but it won't be in the same way that Facebook probably isn't anymore.

So, be current, be aware of what's on magazine covers or the latest and greatest websites. Have a. I don't know, have a link on your browser that gives you the top ten designed websites in the world at any one time. You can do these searches. In which case, have a look at what they're using as the imagery.

As a photographer, that's our job. You can have a style, of course you can. But, you should all, always be absorbing and assimilating. And, some of what we've seen over the past few days, It felt a little bit like it was looking backwards rather than looking forwards and we should represent the future as photographers, not just what's gone on before.

Again, I'm not saying throw away the classical techniques, of course I'm not, because they're there for a reason. Cliches are cliches for a reason and rules are essentially just cliches. So don't ignore it, but interpret it in new and exciting ways. Style images. Finish images, use post production, try different things that it would never have occurred to you to do.

Just be exciting and be current.

Capturing Genuine Connections

Uh, for you wedding photographers or frankly anybody who photographs people who are in love, uh, or people I suppose because there's an extension to this, um, one of the things that came up a little bit was a disc or various discussions around whether A couple had been photographed and it looked like they were genuinely and authentically in love.

The connection between the couple, um, there needs to be movement in that. It's like choreographing a dance when you have a couple sort of, um, in each other's arms or really close to each other. Don't think like a photographer, what do you want the end, what do you want the shape of them to be? Think like a choreographer and think, what would I like the movement to be?

And then as a, as a photographer, think, okay, now I've got the movement and the shape and the emotion and the rhythm of this, what moment do I want to hit the button? Now of course you can pose it statically, that's not a problem, but it should feel alive. It should feel like they're moving, that they are in harmony with each other.

There needs to be a connection between them. And then ultimately, there needs to be a connection with you, the photographer. Or more importantly. The viewer who sees the image in the end and to do that they must connect with your camera now You're holding the camera So they have to connect with you and then you have to guide them towards the lens if it's eye contact that you want But there has to be they have to like you and you have to genuinely like them It shows in the images when there's a relationship between the subject and the photographer You can feel it.

It's, it's sort of there in the picture. It's there in their eyes and their muscles. It's there in the timing of the shot that you take. It's there in the way their shoulders rise or fall or the way he's not just holding her or she's holding him or she's holding her.

Building Connections Through Photography

It's the way that they bring each other closer together with laughter or emotion of some sort.

So have a connection with your with your subject and get them to have a connection with each other. Um, one of the biggest things I've thought of, I've lost track of where I am, of course, because I'm in the car and it's, the road's busy.

The Importance of Entering Competitions

Um, but one of the things that occurs to me, it's the most important thing you can do with, um, competitions and qualifications is do them.

Actually get off your hands and do them. I know some very good photographers who think that they won't win something or they won't qualify. And they certainly won't if they don't enter, that's certainly true, but if they do enter, who knows? I know some of the categories that came through for the print competition this year were eminently winnable.

There are great images in those categories, but I know photographers producing equally good images Who had they simply entered, stood as good a chances as anybody else? Why not? I obviously can't enter because I'm, uh, judging. But with another association I enter all the time quietly behind the scenes. I don't really make a fuss about it because if I'm not entering, if I'm not pushing my style and my techniques, how can I consider that I'm qualified to either mentor or judge others?

So I do it too, and yes, it's heartbreaking when your images don't. Well, of course it is. It can be expensive and soul destroying. You know, it's a real problem. But, equally, it can be hugely rewarding. So you, you can't win if you don't enter. You can't qualify if you don't try.

Learning from the Process

And the process, particularly with qualifications, the process is so much more important than Than the qualification itself, though that is absolutely not , not how it feels.

It's only afterwards when you can say these things. You never, anyone if, if anyone's ever going for qualification. Um, and I say to them, um, you know, uh, how do you feel? And they're like, ah, it doesn't really matter. It's just a process. It's a journey that I'm like, no way. No, no, no, no way. I know you are not telling the truth.

Why? You wouldn't put yourself through that kind of expense and that kind of pain and discomfort if it was just about the learning. But the learning is the bit of the puzzle. When you look back with hindsight, whether your panel is successful or not is the most valuable thing you'll do. Because that's where the lessons are.

That's where the learning is. That's where the development is. The letters give you confidence. The letters help you shape who you want to be. And they certainly, if you know what you're doing, help you market yourself. But they're not a definition of who you are. The process of getting there, though, is, because it gives you, or it shapes, or it demonstrates, I don't know what the right word is, that you have the dedication to your craft, that you're willing to get down and push and push and push to be the very best that you can be.

You're never going to be a finished article, or at least I don't think you can be.

Using Insecurity as a Driving Force

I think every day, I mean for me for instance, I wake up every day it's a mix of enthusiasm and energy and ambition and insecurity. I just think, oh I'm not very good but today I'm going to be better. That might not sound like the most reassuring thing in the world but it is what it is.

You know, I've learned to use my insecurities as my driving force. I don't like feeling that way. God, I hate feeling that way. Why would I like feeling that way? You know, I look at some of the photographers out there that are Sometimes massively, they overrate themselves, but they're just hugely confident.

And I'm not that guy. That's not my personality. Mine is to feel, I suppose, um, insecure about my work. But I use that insecurity and that sense of, I wish I was better as my driving force. And everyone has their own driving force. You'll have to find yours. I've found mine. I know what it is. I wish it was something slightly different.

I wish it was something slightly more sort of positive, I guess. I saw a counselor would ask me why, why have I empowered other people to make me feel insecure or something. I have no idea. I've never been to a counselor, but I'm guessing that it's my, my, the energy that I use, the fire that I have might not be the most positive, um, and reaffirming way of doing things.

But for me, it, it is who I am. And it pushes me to do things. It pushes me to try things. It gives me the energy to overcome hurdles and, and create videos or create the website or write a book with someone. Um, terrifying though it is, I just want to be better at it and so I'll keep trying it. Uh, so put yourself forward.

The Magic of Light in Photography

Another thing I'm just thinking of is the headlamps. Headlamps and taillights are all around me. Is learn how to craft lights, or just as importantly, learn how to see light. Learn how it lands on someone's face, or their figure, or a scene, or a dog, or a cat, I don't know. Saw some of the most exquisite, exquisite cat photography today.

Saw some And the author of the panel has learned how to use light to bring out texture and form and character and personality in cats. That's her skill set. It's wonderful. And she's learned how to do it. And, you know, that's where photography stems from. It's all about light. If you're a daylight photographer, learn how to see it.

Learn how to observe. Learn how to almost Smell it out. , you know, you see it. You, you, do you ever get excited be, I mean, even now I'm watching a car ahead of me and I can see the pool of light on the road ahead from its headlamps and it's dark in between the Land Rover and him or her, and then there's a pool of light in front of that car.

Well, that pool of light might be quite an interesting thing to light somebody in. I spent my life doing that. I can't help it. It's like light is addictive. It's like a drug. Finding good light, or interesting light, or light that might give an effect, when, you know, the cars coming the other way, their headlamps are giving the car I'm following, kiss lighting, because of course it's bouncing off the sides of the metal, and I can see these kind of pockets of light along the side of the car, you know, that's just, oh, that'd be really interesting to photograph someone in that kind of lighting, you know, let's say a, you know, a car's headlamps are probably a bit low to the ground, But if you had a truck or something with overhead lights and you could get them to point down so they're above someone's head but you've got other trucks in the distance where they've got their normal almost ground level headlamps on and they they're going to create the backlighting yeah that could be really super interesting and it's that enthusiasm for exploring light that I think photographers need if they're going to create the truly stunning interesting images.

I mean I would say that, I love light. You know, as an Elinchrom ambassador, you'd expect me to say I love light, but I do. I just find it, I don't know why, why, I have no idea why that might be a thing, but I love it. I absolutely love it. And so, yeah, you know, after all of that, I'm sure there's a million things, I'm sure there's a million things that I've missed.

And had I spent the time thinking about it and driving home and writing up my notes and recording the podcast properly in the studio, it would sound a little bit better. I'd be jolted around a little less, um, but it probably wouldn't get done because we're so busy just at the moment. So apologies for me doing a Land Rover edition at 70 mile an hour because I can hear it's noisy, but otherwise I was not going to record one at all.

Um, the time pressures are now such that I really do have to dedicate more of it to mastering portrait photography, to our website, to building the, um, room mock ups to drop pictures into for beautiful framing, to creating interesting ideas on images and writing up notes on old images. Have I said the videos?

I must have said the videos. Oh, maybe I haven't said the videos.

Exciting New Projects and Team Members

We're creating these beautiful videos. We've got so many news joined us in the team. Katie's joined our team, who's amazing. She's great. She's a real breath of fresh air. She's young. And so she sees the world totally different to me. Um, so, you know, between us, I think, hopefully, it's a two way street.

I'll help her understand mostly software. I'm pretty good at picking up software. Um, and so Blackmagic's DaVinci is now another one of the tools that I'm reasonably comfortable with and can get my head around. Um, so I'm helping her get up to speed with that, but in return, she's showing us a young view of creating videos, which there's no way I would have done.

Sarah and I wouldn't have done it that way. But I'm really loving having that around. But it takes time. All of this takes time. And, um, running the workshops, you know, we now run regular workshops and they're going to increase.

Workshops and Community Engagement

Um, because we just love doing them but also it's part of our business model going forward.

Um, and to have time I've got to stop doing so many other things that I've been involved in for a while anyway. So, uh, Yep, standing down and it's all for mastering portrait photography. On that note about workshops, we do have a space actually, we've got a mastering studio lighting workshop which is on Monday the 4th of November, so it's a few weeks away, but there's still a space on there.

I love this day, I think this day is one of my favorite workshops, um, that we do, where we just play with lights, play with ideas, try things out, smoke machines maybe. GoBos, BigLights, SmallLights, um, HighKey, LowKey, you name it, we just play. Because that's by far the best way of learning stuff. Um, you can do whatever way you want.

Some people are bookworms, some people like a video or two. For me, I like messing around, um, and coming up with ideas. So that's on Monday the 4th of November, if you fancy it. Why is it right, when you're overtaking someone, why do they accelerate? Bye. Anyway, um, I don't like motorway driving very much. Everyone's very aggy, people are very aggressive, they just, it's a weird, ever since COVID it seems to be a very weird world. Uh, anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, I just love playing in the studio, and that's the workshop. So it's Mastering Portrait, sorry, Mastering Studio Lighting, uh, on the 4th of November, if anyone fancies it, just Google Paul Wilkinson Photography Workshops, or head over to paulwilkinsonphotography.co.Uk, or similarly, you can go to masteringportraitphotography.com, and the workshops are in there, in the Academy. The same workshops, but they're in the Academy, uh, over there. Eventually we're going to fuse all of the workshops into Mastering Portrait Photography. There's one single entity, so at the moment they're sort of co existing on the two sites, um, but it's the same workshop.

Uh, we will be putting more and more of them up on there.

Subscription Benefits and Pricing

If you subscribe, actually, to Mastering Portrait Photography, um, it's not a lot of money. It's 6. 99 at the moment, as at the time of recording, it's 6. 99 a month, which is actually the same price as the cup of coffee I've got sitting here in my Land Rover.

So it's one very large pumpkin spice latte per month. Um, To join the website, but if you do that, you get an advance notice of the, um, workshops, um, and you get to, uh, jump on them earlier than anybody else. You get to be part of our community, the Facebook community, uh, which we're building, um, making that more and more vibrant and interesting.

And, um, you can post pictures in there and people would jump in and give you tips. If you ask for it, if you don't really want it, then, you know, you can just post your pictures for the sheer joy of it. Uh, so that's all part of it. You get to download any of the tools for free, you get to download any of the room mock ups for free, you get to watch all of the videos and see all of the diagrams and there are hundreds of them.

I did a count up the other day and it's still like 400 diagrams I think, it's a lot. Um, but the whole site is there 6. 99 a month. If you want to spend it, if you want to spend a little less on a bit of a discount and do it over a year then you can enter the annual one. Um, and so if you pay annually it's 69.

99 for the year. Uh, which of course is about, what's that, 10 percent cheaper. You know, have I got that right? It's 10, it's 12 months for the price of 10. There you go. I don't know what that is. It's a mathematical term. I'm going to have to look that up if I'm going to publicize this. Um, uh, but that gives you a slightly better rate.

Slightly cheaper, but also gives you discount codes to the workshops. So not only do you hear about them early, but you get a little bit of a discount on them too. There are a couple of other options on there as well. If you fancy. And no, you're going to book onto our workshops or come to us for mentoring.

There's two other options to, uh, for the membership if you want them, um, and you can have a look on our website for that. Just Google or search for Mastering Portrait Photography Pricing, or just head to our website and hit the pricing, uh, link. So that's where we are.

Final Thoughts and Farewell

I'm just heading south on the M40. Um, I've run out of things that I've remembered to say.

That's not that I have run out of things to say. I just have run out what I have remembered to say. to say. So as I thread my, oh that blooming van's just overtaken me again, um, so as I head my way south on thankfully a relatively clear motorway, uh, I'm going to say thank you for listening if you have listened to the end of this podcast.

I know it's a bit noisy when I'm driving in a Land Rover and recording it, um, if you're hearing it I managed to at least convince myself that the wasn't too bad, it didn't sound too rattly. Well, if you're not hearing it, it means I've pulled this podcast.

I'm not releasing it because it's just not good enough, uh, audio, but thank you for listening to this point. Please do subscribe, wherever it is that you receive your podcasts or you consume your podcasts. By doing so, you'll get to hear the episodes as they come out. So if there are any offers and things, or any last spaces, you get to hear about them first.

Uh, you can hear us on Spotify, iTunes, and all over the place, basically. And whatever else you do in the coming weeks, be kind to yourself. Take care.

Well, this hasn't been the easiest of years with inflation, geographical tensions and all-out confrontations, terrible weather and political transitions.  And last night the trusty Land Rover Defender broke down one more time.  Possibly one LAST time.

But through all of that, we have to look for the possibles - the light at the end of the tunnel.  But maybe it's us that has to create, rather than simply walk toward, the light.  

 

Enjoy!

 

Cheers
P.

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If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

 

Transcript

EP156 - Creating Light At The End Of The Tunnel

[00:00:00] Paul - Studio Rode Broadcaster V3: It's Sunday afternoon. It's late. It's getting dark. It's getting dark so early now. Um, Sarah finds it really depressing, but I love this time of year. I love the colors. I love the cool of the air. Though that said this has been well, a weekend of ups and downs. Uh, yesterday we photographed a beautiful wedding. Uh, Hannah and Tom, one of our clients, just the most stunning. Stunning day.

[00:00:25] Sarah came with me because it was a bit of a handful. It was a lot of photography to get through far more far, far more. In fact, Then I would have liked to have agreed to. But in the end, it was one of those very complicated weddings where there was family from all over the world. And they wanted lots of different combinations of groups to be photographed in a very small space of time.

[00:00:46] But they were the. The most incredible couple, the weather was beautiful. The venue were fantastic. The people there were amazing. And it was just, well, it was just a thrill to have Sarah at working alongside me, which made everything. Okay. Uh, the day before we'd spent with Jake, where. So we've gone up to Nottingham, stayed there for the night, had a wonderful night out and discovered amongst many other things, the magic of a wine bar that has vending machines, kid you not. So you put your card in. Uh, you can get a glass from any bottle of wine you like. And it was all just really, really lovely bit expensive, but really lovely. I also discovered the magic. Now I've not experienced these before I am 55 years old. And have never needed to use them.

[00:01:29] Blister plasters. Yep. Blister plasters. So I bought a pair of Converse, uh, decided for a change to have a different style. And it turns out to be a style that cuts the hell out of the back of my feet. Uh, but didn't discover that until two hours into walking around Nottingham. So Sarah, obviously, a bit more used to these things than me having worn heels, um, showed me the glory that is a blister plastic. I'm still wearing them. They're great.

[00:01:54] Anyway, an amazing day, a beautiful wedding, the following day. And then driving home. Last night, congratulating ourselves on having done a really good day's work, beautiful photographs, uh, into, uh, on the memory cards. Land Rover all packed up, um, and then proceeded to have a whole series of really irritating road closures, motorway closures queues, culminating in one

[00:02:21] that turned out to be well, possibly the end of the Land Rover we're queuing and have been queuing for about half an hour. But by queuing. I mean, we're essentially stationary, just stop starting. And then I went to put it into first gear. Nothing. Absolutely no way of getting it into first gear. I've got my foot on the clutch, lift the clutch, nothing. Put my foot down, the pedal is staying stuck to the floor.

[00:02:47] So I've got a couple of tons of land Rover in a single lane queue that no one can get round me. And it's not moving.

[00:02:55] Now. I remember an old trick. My dad taught me. And I don't know why. Why this was a tricky taught me because we don't have, or didn't have at that time. Anywhere near where I lived level crossings with no gates, but he said, if you ever get stuck on a level crossing and you can't for some reason, get your car to start, or it's just stalled, put it into first gear. Turn over the starter motor and it will give you just enough power to get yourself out of that situation.

[00:03:24] So I just very quickly thought, well, I'm blocking an already irate queue, cause we've all been stuck there for, for hours. Um, I can maybe get it over to the side of the road where I can call recovery. So I turned the engine off, wedged the gear stick into first where the engine, uh, stationary turned it over on the starter motor, which of course with the clutch being permanently engaged now. Uh, rolled the wheels and got me just enough movement to get out of the way of the barely moving traffic and onto the hard shoulder, up to the embankment, where Sarah and I proceeded to look like for the next five hours.

[00:04:04] I kid you not it's cold. It's dark. Thankfully, this time. I'm like the last time I broke down like this. It isn't snowing. Uh, but we lay with as many layers on as we could and a high vis vest over the top with our feet. Um, strapped into boots, but also now in polythene bags to try and keep the cold at bay, because it was absolutely freezing.

[00:04:23] We're laying on the embankment, up to the rear and above the Land Rover. And anyone who must have seen us and they all must have seen us. Cause we're wearing, high-vis looked like a pair of corpses. Just lying there in the Moonlight. It must've been a strain site, but given the RAC who came to recover us, took five hours and they took five hours, because all of the recovery vehicles were involved in re in, sorting out the crash that caused the motorway to close, which is the reason I was in a queue. So it's one of those very complicated things. But in the end. It culminated in Sarah and I lying side by side, like two corpses in a crime drama. Uh, it must've been a dump site, you know, the kind of thing the police say, wow, this isn't where they died, this must be the dumpsite. Um, and they've left them laying here on the embankment in homage to the Land Rover. I've no idea. I was very glad Sarah was there. Um, so in fits and starts, we slept eventually we got picked up at about, uh, I think it was about four o'clock in the morning, maybe half past four in the morning, um, and then, uh, took the recovery vehicle. The Landrover is right now sitting outside the garage that did the work on the engine earlier in the year. They're going to know the minute they turn up that something is wrong. My suspicion and I hope I'm wrong. Is that the slave cylinder on the clutch has failed because if it has, it means the whole transmission and gearbox has got to come out. And that's a proper, yet another expensive job.

[00:05:52] And. I think maybe, maybe this will be the one that says the end of the Land Rover. I'm Paul. And this is the masteringportraitphotography.com podcast.

[00:06:03] Well, hello again. We are back recording the podcast. And once again, it's a tale of woe and drama. Sarah said to me, as I left, she said, you need to record a podcast because you haven't done it for ages. She said, it's all right. It's all right. To feel a little less upbeat than you do normally. And that's just as well this year. I think this year is a year that I'll be happy to get to the end of, we started this year with such energy and enthusiasm.

[00:06:50] We thought that. You know, we're getting to the end of the backwash from COVID, everything would pick up, but of course, inflation hit the roof. We've had in terms of weather, just awful weather, which always deflates the mood. We've had a general election In this country, as well as in the states that you're about to have yours and we've already had ours. Which I thought would , would Herald in good news and optimism. Um, you know, I think it was time we had to change. There's no question about that. And no matter which side of the politic line, uh, you prefer, there's no question at all that we needed to change, but that changed that the good news side of that hasn't lasted particularly long. Um, Inflation is still high.

[00:07:28] The weather is still crappy. Seriously, we've had nothing but rain. I was so blessed with the wedding on Saturday. Um, the sun shone, and it was glorious. It was dry. It was warm enough. Um, it was just beautiful light. But that has not been the story of this year. The amount of water around us, just at the moment.

[00:07:48] And nobody's thinking when they wake up and read the news about the terrible weather, the terrible economy. They're politicians causing just all, just doing stupid things. You know, inflation, um, the stuff going on in the middle east or stuff going on in, on the Russian borders. You know, very few people are gonna wake up and think, oh, with all of that news do you know what I need what I need is a photographer. It's uh, there's work around, but it's just not the year we thought it would be, this is not been. A vintage year for photographers.

[00:08:18] And he really don't have to ask very far to find that out. Now we've done. All right. If I'm honest we're probably bucking the trend, but we have had to work, ah, back-breaking hours to do it far harder then we've had to work any of the year. It won't be a record breaking year, that's for that's for sure. But it will be good enough somewhere in the middle of our regular numbers, but we have worked tirelessly to do it. Backbreakingly tirelessly.

[00:08:47] I cannot remember feeling this tired though, having said that. I've just spent the night laying on an embankment in the freezing cold, trying to get some sleep. Maybe that's why I'm feeling. I quite so tired, but even talking to the videographer. Uh, on at the wedding on Saturday, he was talking about the bits of the industry in his region because we were working out of region and he was saying the same thing.

[00:09:10] There's just. It's just been a tough year. There. Aren't the number of weddings. For instance, if you're a wedding photographer. Um, and there isn't the money sloshing around at the has been, um, Sort of in the industry with our clients because our clients are under the same pressure as we are. I was trying to work out our operating costs. Um, on things like, you know, albums and frames.

[00:09:32] And I think on average, somewhere in the region of 15 to 25% increase, over two years. And if you put that into the context of running a business, And, and also assume that your clients are having exactly the same problems with their day-to-day expenditure. It means that we're running a business that's less profitable than it would be if we don't change our prices, but at a time when people have less money to spend. If we did increase all of our prices and of course we're all juggling that particular set of requirements.

[00:10:04] Uh, and on top of that, of course, one of the reasons we're also feeling tired. Is we're still running workshops. Uh, I'm still at the moment, the, uh, Chair of awards and qualifications for the British Institute of Professional Photography.

[00:10:17] But. Um, I mean, big news on that one is I am stepping down from that role at the end of this year. Now I've loved every single second of the past three or so years I've been in this seat.

[00:10:29] Uh, I've done everything that I wanted to do. We've organized it. We've got the standards where I wanted them to be, so that they're rock solid. You can trust if somebody got the letters after their name from. The BIPP then they've earned them. Um, and that means that we have real cute OSS in the industry. It means it's something that people really want to attain.

[00:10:49] And that's, I guess what I wanted to be able to do. But I also loved being a mentor. And while I was chair of one of the qualifications bodies, it's very hard. To be a mentor because it can be really easily accused that I might be, um, swaying results or influencing the outcome of judging.

[00:11:08] So I took the decision when I accepted . The chair of judge's role that I would not to do any mentoring towards qualifications or anything involved with people wanting to enter the competitions and things, because it just, it didn't look great,

[00:11:21] But it's something I've always. Really enjoyed doing so it's something I can return to. I'll get a chance now to actually enjoy looking at other people's work, um, guiding, nurturing, you know, also spending some time developing our own work because you need at the same time, I need the time to dedicate to our own businesses for a little bit.

[00:11:41] So I'm stepping back. At least, you know, in a frontline role. Uh, from, um, the chairing side of the BIPP. Hopefully I'll still get to judge, but I certainly won't be chairing it. Uh, we're still running the workshops, of course, on that note, uh, I think we have just two left this year. .

[00:11:58] So the thing without podcast is our podcasts have a very long lifespan.

[00:12:03] People are listening to podcasts from sort of six or seven years ago. Uh, but as of right now, which is the 28th of September, I think. Hang on a minute. Which I can't believe I had to go look that up on my screen, the 29th of September. Uh, 2024, we have two remaining workshops in our diary. I think there's one space left on each off the top of my head.

[00:12:26] Uh, on the 4th of November, we have Mastering Advanced Studio Lighting, which is, I might actually have become my favorite workshop to run because we just play: we play with lights.

[00:12:40] We play with ideas with form. Uh, we play with shape and color. We play with the smoke machines that people want to, we play with continuous light if people want to. Um, of course, as an Elinchrom Ambassador, that nearly all of it is geared around strobes. You name it? If it's in the studio, we can do it. And I absolutely adore this workshop.

[00:12:59] I think there's a space left on that last, the 4th of November. It's an all day course. Uh, all day workshop, sorry. Uh, and then the second one we have, which is a brand new workshop. We've never tried this before and we'll see how this goes. Having spent the night lying on an embankment last night, I'm not so certain. I want to be outside at night for a while. However, it's at the end of November 25th. Of November. We have a mastering day and night workshop. Now this workshop. Is one, uh, I think it might've been Sarah's idea. Uh, If it's successful. It was my idea. If it doesn't work, definitely Sarah's idea.

[00:13:36] No, I think it was Sarah's idea and I think it's a great idea. Uh, Mastering Day and Night. So we start unlike most of our workshops where we start at sort of 9, 9 30 in the morning. That this one. We're going to start straight after lunch. We're going to spend the afternoon working with daylight and then as dusk falls. We're going to work with a nighttime scene.

[00:13:55] So it's not really a, it's not studio lighting, but we might use some lighting. Depending on what the delegates want. So we're going to mix it up a little bit. We're going to spend a half the workshop working with available daylight and half the workshop working with a combination. Um, of available light, which of course won't be daylight, but it might be street lighting. Um, or light coming from people's porches and those kinds of things working around the village.

[00:14:21] We'll also have some lights with us. Just as I did at the wedding yesterday, I see. In this slide. Here's an aside. Uh, yesterday working with the videographer I had in the land Rover. Uh, I had to Elinchrom threes, which I thought we would work with. Cause I love them. Absolutely amazing lights. And I thought we'd do some stroke work. Um, but I also had a pair of aperture. Uh, continuous focusing, uh, spots, focusing spotlights led spotlights.

[00:14:47] They really quite chunky. Um, and they throw off who wrote the most beautiful light as well. Um, and so I said to the videographer, um, we might do some nighttime photography and he looked a little bit glum and he said, yeah, you mean with strobes? Don't you? And I said, well, do you want to do anything with it?

[00:15:02] So, yeah, I'd really, I'd really like to be able to capture some of that. So I'll tell you what, why don't we run the two spotlights were run continuous lighting for this one. Because working with a videographer, it makes it a little bit easier for you. Um, and while I'd still prefer to be using my Elinchrom Threes, there's no reason why we can't do something at least similar. Um, with continuous light, so threw a spotlight and had a play at night.

[00:15:23] And the reaction from Richard, the videographer. It was just brilliant. He took one for, oh, it's not a photo who's doing. Slow-mo. High-speed video. And he just went. Wow.

[00:15:36] And then everything I set up, he wanted. Like sort of five seconds of slow motion video of it. Um, moving around cause you get lens flan, all of those things. So we were creating very similar vibes that you can do with stills and a strobe, uh, with continuous light and uh, in his case with video. So it was quite exciting to do that. Um, anyway, back to Mastering Day Night, we will be using a mix of different lighting, maybe a bit of off-camera flash, depending on what people ask for.

[00:16:00] Um, Now. On the topic of workshops next year, we're looking at. Um, some new ideas and that if there's anything you'd like to, uh, like us to host, so you think would be fun, then please do drop us a line. You can always get ahold of me on paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk dot code at UK. That's paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk .

[00:16:22] If there's something you can think of that, do you know what it'd be great. If you could run a day on whatever it is. As long as it's photographic people, not animals. And not buildings, not landscapes. I'm not good at all of those things, but it's photographing people. Uh, understanding light then of course, why not drop us a line?

[00:16:41] Um, one of the ones we're already looking at, and this I'd be curious if anyone's interested. Um, we haven't got dates for these yet, but we are looking to do. A two day workshop. That's a back-to-back workshop. Um, Now I don't yet. So we haven't quite worked out yet. What will go into those two days, but we know, we know it's just going to be. Uh, blast. And of course, with it being over two days in the interim evening, we get to sit. Have a meal, maybe have a few drinks. And chat about photography and not quite sure. Um, what the format will be.

[00:17:16] My guess at this stage is, uh, the very least. A day and a half of photography and then half a day may be. On workflow or maybe on Photoshop or maybe on Lightroom. Uh, maybe the use of AI tools, which of course are now a considerable part of all of our workflow. I don't know. I honestly don't know. We're still working it out um, for those of you who are part of our workshop community people who've been on our workshops. We've sent you a quick survey. Um, which we'd love to hear your thoughts on for those of you who listened to podcast, but never been on one of our workshops. Again, if you have an idea, and you think that might be fun to come along to, uh, please do drop me a line.paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk . Uh, of course alongside all of this. And another reason why you might hear the fatigue in my voice. I think today I can be excused. All right. I think today. I'm allowed to sound a little bit weary because having laid for five hours on an embankment next to a slow moving motorway. Um, until like four or five in the morning. I think I'm all right to feel to, to justifiably sound a little bit fatigued, but we're also running a couple of different businesses and one of the things we're still working on and I'm still reworking is the mastering portrait photography website, still a few bits to sort out.

[00:18:36] So those of you. Who do go on and off the website, apologies for things moving around as we're doing this. , I had an email the other day that said, do you know your shops down? Um, and for every user that I tested on the shop was just fine. Uh, but for just one or two uses, not so much. Um, I had to go digging around in some code. Uh, to find a one-line and do you know what it turned out to be?

[00:18:57] It was a line I'd put in to debug the rest of it. The rest of it was fine, but the line of debug code was glitching. It's just. Oh, I hate it when that happens. It's an old school. Uh, cockup . When you put in test code and it's the test code that causes the problem. Uh, so never mind apologies for that.

[00:19:16] Uh, so. But we will keep you posted. There's lots of new articles and there's going to be regular videos and all sorts of. Uh, features on their rolling forwards. Uh, sad news this past couple of weeks, is that the incredible NPhoto magazine, which I just loved writing for has stopped publishing. What a shame I'm gutted about it.

[00:19:37] I've loved every time they've asked me to write for them. And so it's just been, um, I dunno, it's just been part of my monthly activities is to sit down. Tapping the, uh, figurative pen on my teeth and wondering what to write. And of course it being about Nikon and my love of Nikon. It's been a real pleasure to do, however, as with all of these things, when doors close, other doors open and it looks like there's a chance, at least that I'll be writing for an even bigger online title. Um, They approached me. Um, some of the same editors were involved in the new, well, not a new sites and established site, but they've moved over from their role at NPhoto, into new roles. Um, and they reached out to see if I'd be interested. In putting together some ideas to write for that.

[00:20:25] So. Um, like I said, you know, some doors close and while I'm really sad and photo has gone. Um, then, uh, maybe just maybe another door is, uh, opening. I've just got to figure out what angle to take on it, because it's a really open, brief, as long as it's interesting. Um, then he said, I can pretty much talk about anything.

[00:20:44] I like. So, whether it's business or techniques may be creative ideas, I don't know. Um, the state of the industry, AI post-processing. I honestly don't know, but one thing they have said. Is I could do with writing some things that are slightly contentious, at least in the sense that they can create a little quote that, uh, will get people out of bed and engaged . There's some ways, many of the things, um, I'm not that good acts.

[00:21:11] I don't know. That I'm particularly contentious. I did get in a, it was a wonderful review. We had at one of our workshops through the day. Um, and the review said. It's just great. And he said he really appreciated the fact that I was ever so slightly irreverent sometimes. Uh, which I think is about as far as I would get, I don't know. That I'm known for being particularly contentious, but it might be something I have to get my head round.

[00:21:37] They also said I'm going to need. Good headlines now, for those of you who are regulars with the podcast, you'll know that one of my weak spots is I'm not very good at writing. Headlines. That's just not my scale. Just definitely not good at it. I try I've even tried just one of the few things that I've tried, getting chat, GPT input on.

[00:21:56] So dear Chat, GPT. Uh, please give me some, uh, I dunno, punchy headlines for this article. And when it comes back with just they're even worse than the ones that I write. So I've come back to writing my own. Um, that's definitely not my skill and the editors I've been working with whenever they've taken my articles, they've written far, far better headlines than I ever have.

[00:22:19] So hopefully they'll look after that, but it was there. In the brief. Um, so, you know, I'm gonna have to learn some new skills, enough to be a bit contentious. I want to write some better headlines. I'm just gonna have to get my head down and, learned some new stuff, but here's the point. No matter just how rough this year has been.

[00:22:37] And I think in some ways, at least psychologically, this has been a tougher year than some of the ones we've been through recently COVID well, that was out of our control. Um, coming out of COVID. Well, everybody knew it was going to be tricky. But now, with so little reason for it to be quite so tough.

[00:22:59] At least there's no. I mean, I know there are reasons for it. I'm not saying there aren't. But it just feels like there should have been a better year. But at the end of the day, there's only so long people can be depressed, whether it's me, whether it's my team, whether it's our clients or whether it's the bigger world, the greater world. In general, there always has to be. Light at the end of the tunnel, but here's the but, weirdly. I suspect that light at the end of the tunnel is the light that we put there ourselves. It's almost like a mirror being held up. So that it reflects back the light that you have to generate, and that's not an easy trick, particularly when you know, I'm facing yet another land Rover breakdown and possibly the Last land Rover Defender breakdown.

[00:23:50] I'm not entirely certain that at the end of this year, we'll still have a Defender. I don't know how I can have a car, that I'm worried is going to break down every time I head out on to a gig. Um, But it is the trick that I'm going to have to master, to be, to have light at the end of the tunnel. It will be me that has to create it.

[00:24:09] And it has to be reflected back at me. I have a suspicion. That's just the only way to do it. If you can't create the light, there's nothing out there to run to. And I intend to run towards the light. So in spite of the rain, the time pressures, rather buggered, Land Rover Defender. Ultimately it's down to me. To shine, a light that I am running towards, and I'm going to choose that light.

[00:24:36] I'm going to make that light. I am gonna look for the new opportunities. I'm gonna. put, together new workshops. I'm going to focus on all of the new opportunities that are thrown up over the past couple of weeks. Um, I am loving running the workshops and they are going to get bigger and stronger and more exciting.

[00:24:52] I'm loving making the website changes. To Mastering Portrait Photography, the videos that Sarah, myself and Katie are creating. Um, the time I've had to spend with the kids. And of course the incredible clients that we've been able to work with and the images that we've created so far this year, and the many more. There are to come.

[00:25:12] That's the light at the end of the tunnel and that's what we're creating.

[00:25:17] The team around me are well, frankly, fantastic. And one thing from last night is unexpectedly lying under the stars. I was lying under the stars with my wife, Sarah, who is to me. my savior. It was just not lovely. I'm not going to say it was lovely because it was so cold. Um, and so slightly depressing. Um, however, if I was going to be there with anybody, it would be there with Sarah. And so for me, that's a little high spot in what was otherwise quite a dark. Uh, at cold night,

[00:25:46] On that note, I need an early night now as I haven't had any sleep. And I have to be up early yet again. To go and explain why yet again, I'm not really happy that my clutch has failed. Less than eight months after having the entire engine and transmission, replaced. But whatever else you're doing. In this cold weather. Shine a light and be kind to yourself.

[00:26:10] Take care.

Sometimes it's just a pleasure to sit back and listen.  This is one of those moments - for me, certainly, but hopefully for you too. 

I had the pleasure of sitting and chatting with two icons of the industry - Sean Conboy and the inimatable nonagenarian, Stuart Clark who is not only still shooting at the age of 97 but is a considerable racontour (you can hear me and Sean laughing in the background throughout!)

Stuart started his career in 1941, so his stories are not only entertaining but are fascinating as they cover every photography development from glass plate through to the state of the art digital wizardry we're facing today.

This interview is worth listening to every one of its 90 or so minutes!

Enjoy!

 

Cheers
P.

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If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Paul: So there are so, so many things I love about being in this industry, the things we get to do, and in particular, this podcast, and one of the many things is having these moments that you're about to hear, where I get to sit and chat with someone I've known for a very long time, Sean Conboy, fantastic photographer, and just a wonderful human being.

[00:00:20] And someone he introduced me to, a guy called Stuart Clark. 

[00:00:23] Now Stuart is 98 years old in July this year. Self proclaimed as one of the oldest working photographers in the country, and I'm not sure that anyone's going to argue with that. He started training as a photographer in 1940. That makes this, he's been working as a photographer for 84 years.

[00:00:46] And the whole of this interview is taking place in what was, his photography studio in a little town just outside Leeds. It's his front living room, but it's huge. It's got a high ceiling and you can imagine how the lighting would have been hot, continuous lights and families just having the best time with someone who I learned very quickly, is a storyteller and a raconteur, uh, just a wonderful, a wonderful human being. There are lots of things to listen out for in the following interview, and let me draw your attention to just a few. Uh, listen out for the flash powder story. It's very funny. Uh, the story of, uh, People retouching, lots of retouching stories from the 1940s and billiard ball complexions.

[00:01:31] . Doing multiple jobs in a day. He used to do three or four jobs in a day, and have the timing so accurate that could include photographing a wedding. He learned his craft. He's great.

[00:01:42] He's spent time creating images for press, looking for alternative, alternative images and looking for PR images that no matter how much a sub editor crops them, the brand or at least the story is still very much intact. He talks about the utter love of the job and appreciating what a privileged position photographers like ourselves are in every day of the week.

[00:02:07] He talks a little about the role of agencies and how they now manage messages from companies in a way that probably they never did. He talks about relationships and he talks about being positive and persistence. He also talks about the role of the Institute.

[00:02:24] Finally, he talks a little bit about photographers always being the fag end of everything, but in the end, what he talks about really, It's the love of his job and the love of his clients. 

[00:02:35] Why am I telling you all of this upfront? Well, this is a long interview, but the sound of Stuart's voice and the history that it represents, as well as the fact that he's more current than an awful lot of photographers who I know right now who are much younger, uh, but just, there's something in his, his entire manner that is captivating and enthralling, informative and useful. And so, although it's a long interview, I thought I'd just explain a little bit about why I found it so appealing and why I've left the edit almost entirely intact. I've removed a few lumps and bumps where we all managed to hit a microphone as we're gesticulating.

[00:03:16] So picture the scene, there's myself, Sean and Stuart sitting, in armchairs and on couches.

[00:03:27] And if you're wondering why it took me quite so long, this interview is actually, it goes back to February of this year, and why it took me quite so long to get it out, it was partly because there was a lot of of lumps to remove and partly because it was this trip, this interview, this podcast that I was returning home from when the Land Rover blew up.

[00:03:46] And frankly, I think there's a little bit of trauma there with a six and a half thousand pound bill to re, to replace and repair piston number two. I think my heart just, I needed a minute just to not recall it every single time I try to edit this particular podcast down. It's a wonderful interview. Please enjoy.

[00:04:06] I know it's quite long, um, but what an absolute legend. I'm Paul and this is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast. 

[00:04:32] So, firstly, Stuart, thank you for welcoming us into your home. We've driven quite a long way, uh, to come and see you. Sean, uh, recommended we speak to you, because the number of stories you have make even his collection of stories look Insignificant.

[00:04:48] And as we all know, Sean, The Footnote Conboy has more stories than any man I've ever met up until probably this, this moment in time. So to kick the conversation off, how did you become a photographer?

[00:05:05] Stuart: It was an unfortunate or fortunate chain of events because, um, I was at the Leeds College of Art in 1940, 41, and I had the desire and intention of being a commercial artist, which is now referred as graphic designer and at that time, being wartime, there was little advertising being done, and so, uh, perhaps I was not sufficiently talented, but I finished up working for a firm who were essentially photoengravers, but they had a commercial photography studio as well, and they were short of somebody to join them, and I went in there and became virtually an apprentice photographer. This was very interesting because at that time, again, there was very little commercial photography advertising being done, and so all our efforts, or most of our efforts, were centred on war work, which involved going round the factories and, uh, Photographing for record purposes, the input of the particular company. And in those days, I can tell you that that was not a very comfortable proposition because we were on total blackout, and therefore, all the fumes in the factory, whatever they were, had very little chance of escaping, so you've got the fumes and the heat, and then of course we were only Illuminating scenes with flash powder, which was an added hazard, and, and so Photography outside in the factories was not very pleasant, but inside the factory, or in the studio, we were also doing war work, and that was to photograph silhouettes, scale models of all aircraft of both the enemy and, uh, and, uh, Home, uh, Aircraft for identification purposes, so that the air gunners were not shooting our own planes down in action. And another very interesting thing which I have always remembered was that the four, or the eight cannons In the Spitfire, that was four in each wing, were harmonized to converge at a point away from the Spitfire so that the Fire, the maximum fire point was when those two lots of cannons converged.

[00:08:34] The only reference that the pilots had was a silhouette which we had photographed, so that he could visualize that silhouette in the, aiming sight of his 

[00:08:50] guns. 

[00:08:51] Paul: a very early heads up display. 

[00:08:53] Stuart: Indeed. 

[00:08:54] Paul: Yeah.

[00:08:55] Stuart: And, so, that was quite an important element, I think, of our war work for the Air Ministry.

[00:09:03] The main factory was engraving the, conical, rangefinder cones for 25 pound howitzers.

[00:09:14] Paul: Right.

[00:09:15] Stuart: And at the time of leaving school, everybody had to be doing war work. 

[00:09:21] And so I went to the company on the pretext of doing war work of that nature, rather than going round snapping.

[00:09:31] Paul: Right.

[00:09:32] Sean: Stuart, could you also, um, I mean you've told me many great tales about your time actually in the, uh, armed services film unit, i think that might be quite interesting, 

[00:09:42] Stuart: Well, I was called up and because of my interest in mechanical things and gadgetry and so forth, I finished up in the Royal Army Service Corps. But a friend of my mother's husband suggested that I applied for a trade test in photography. And one day I was called up to the orderly room and they said, We've got the movement order here for you. Um, to go to Pinewood Studios, of all places. I don't know what this is about, but anyway, here's your movement order. So, I went down to Pinewood, and we had a trade test, and I think I finished up, uh, top of the, the, uh, examination. But then I was returned to unit at Catterick, and I was up there for another few months, and then I was posted. And eventually, after about six weeks of the posting, I got another movement order to go back to Pinewood Studios, where I started my course in cinephotography,

[00:11:06] and still photography. Now, this was the last course. before Pinewood closed down and the unit closed down. I'm talking about Pinewood closing down, Pinewood was the headquarters of the Army Film and Photographic Unit from when it was formed in October 41.

[00:11:35] The course included preparation for action photography, essentially. when the course started, the war was still on in Central Europe. but before the course finished, it, uh, the war finished.

[00:11:58] And The Japanese War was still going on until September of the same year, which was 45. But we were still being trained, and when the course finished, we had very little to do but just wait to see what happened. And so from September to, um, December of that year, we were just hanging about in the studios.

[00:12:30] We were then posted to the Far East, in fact to Malaya, where the No. 9 unit was formed. Having been moved by Batten's headquarters, Mountbatten's headquarters, from Ceylon to Singapore, thought that it would be probably much more congenial there than in Ceylon, India.

[00:12:57] So number nine was there and it's interesting to note that right at this moment an exhibition is being produced for the photographer's gallery on Bert Hardy's life and Bert Hardy at the time that I there was, in fact, the stills captain in charge of all the still photography in Malay Command. Or the, not Malay Command, the Far East Command, because we had outstations in Java and Hong Kong, and even, uh, one guy, uh, was in, um, in Hiroshima. So that was the formation of the, the, uh, Far East, Southeast Asia Command photographic, uh, outfit. until it closed down, uh, in September, August September of 46, and we are then dispersed Some went to the Imperial War Museum, the Imperial, uh, war, graves Commission, et cetera, and six of us went back to Vienna, where we joined number 9, Public Relations, because unit had been disbanded completely. So, there in, uh, in Austria, we were doing what they call Local Boy Stories, and we made a couple of films on the Irish regiments and also the East Yorkshire, not the East Yorkshire, the Yorkshire regiments who were guarding and on guard duties at the palace, Shurnbran Palace, which everybody has heard of, and um, and so that carried on until, uh, the Until I was demobbed in 1947, December. came home and went back to the company I originally started with because they were compelled to take people for 12 months. And at the end of that time, I decided to leave I had a bit of a a difference of opinion with the studio manager, who was RAF, and I was Army, and I was a sergeant as well, and I don't think he was quite that when he was in the RAF photographic section, but there was a resentment anyway.

[00:16:02] of my presence. 

[00:16:03] So, I went to the firm called C. R. H. Pickards, who were one of the finest industrial, uh, and leading industrial photographic units, companies, in the north of England.

[00:16:24] It was there, then, that I began to learn industrial photography. And we photographed all sorts of various things, from factory engineering, factories, products and so forth, lathes, milling machines, railway engines, all manner of things. And that's where I cut my teeth on industrial photography.

[00:16:56] Sean: And, and Stuart, what sort of, um, equipment would you be using in those days? not 

[00:17:01] Stuart: so ha! 

[00:17:02] Sean: but how 

[00:17:03] would you be lighting these spaces in those days 

[00:17:05] Stuart: um The equipment that we were using was always, almost always, whole plate, six a half, eight by, eight and a half, six a half, uh, folding field cameras. when I started, we

[00:17:29] were on glass plates. But then the advent of film came in. And this was obviously much lighter stuff to carry around. And every, exposure had to count. Now in today's terms, where you press the button and pick the best out of however many, all we used to do was a duplicate at the most. So we used to There was a variation in the exposure or the aperture setting, and that was the only difference the two exposures.

[00:18:19] So what we used to do was develop one side of the, uh, the double dark slides, see what they were like, if they wanted a little bit more or a bit less development, that was applied to second side. And, don't know whether you've ever heard of the expression of, um, developing by, uh, vision. But we used to have a very dim green light, and the sensitive film.

[00:18:59] was not, uh, sensitive to the green light. 

[00:19:03] Paul: All right. 

[00:19:04] Stuart: But you had to be in the darkroom for ten minutes for your eyes to become adjusted, and you could then see absolutely every detail of the, the development process. And when the highlights started to you, to, To show a dark mark through the back of the antihalation backing, then the development was just about right, if but if you wanted a little bit more contrast, then you just pushed it on. If it had been a dull day, a dull, miserable day, then you pushed the development on a little bit further.

[00:19:49] Sean: And 

[00:19:49] Stuart: you've asked 

[00:19:50] Sean: be, how would you be lighting some of these scenes? I'm very intrigued at that 

[00:19:53] Stuart: I 

[00:19:53] Sean: that 

[00:19:53] Stuart: about to say that.

[00:19:54] Um, for big areas, we used to use flash powder. And a little bit of flash powder goes a long way, believe me. But it was pretty dangerous stuff. And um, I remember we photographed a wedding on one occasion at the Majestic Hotel Harrogate. And there were 450 people. at the reception and they wanted a photograph to show as many of the people as possible. So we put the whole plate camera on a table stood up there with tray into which I poured flash powder.

[00:20:38] Now then, this was actuated. with a percussion cap, like we used to have in little

[00:20:46] hand pistols for toys. and when you pulled the release catch, that ignited the cap,

[00:20:56] that ignited the flash powder.

[00:21:00] So, the exposure was only going to be once. One exposure.

[00:21:07] And so, the photographer I was with, he said, right everybody. Look this way, and I want to be making sure that everybody keeps still.

[00:21:21] I'm going to count five for you, but don't move until I've finished counting.

[00:21:29] So the idea was to take the sheath out of the slide. With having put a cap over the lens, shutter, just an open lens with a cap or a lid on the front.

[00:21:46] And the technique was to take the cap off hold it in front of the lens, so that that allowed the vibration or any vibration in the camera to settle down and then take the exposure. the idea was count 1, 2, 3, 4, then take the cup off. And on four I ignited the flash gun and then the cup went on and the guy that I was worth put the sheath back and said, right, let's get out of here quick. The reason for that was that you got the brightness, got the, the buildup of the available lights. then it's just topped off, illuminated with the flash, not a very big one, I hasten to add. But the significance of flash powder was that there was a flame which simply went upwards. 

[00:23:00] And that was it, that was all there was to be seen. But, it produced smoke, which used to go into, onto the ceiling, and it would roll across the ceiling, carrying with it the grains of the flash powder, which had obviously changed colour from

[00:23:24] silver

[00:23:25] To yellow, that was okay. But when the waiters came to move the, uh, soup plates, what they found was a white circle on a yellow 

[00:23:47] cloth.

[00:23:51] And you can also visualize the fact that a lot of people had a lot of. Little flash powder grains in their hair 

[00:24:01] as well. well. By the time that

[00:24:04] By the time that this happened, we were halfway back to Leeds. 

[00:24:08] Sean: Very good. 

[00:24:09] Stuart: But this this was the scourge of flash powder because you could only take one shot. Because the place used to, the whole of the place, the factory, if you using a large amount of powder, made a lot of smoke, and it just collected on the ceiling and it obscured it, the vision. So, we used to use photo floods, these were overrun pearl lamps, we used to have six on a button. And if the subject was still, we could go around on a long lead and paint scene with light. And that was, and that became established, So flash balder started to go,

[00:25:08] Paul: Right.

[00:25:10] Stuart: but you see, at this time, flash bulbs hadn't really got going.

[00:25:17] The GEC flash bulbs, which were foil filled, were about the only thing that was available. Um, in this, in this country. And they were sympathetic.

[00:25:31] And the GEC Warehouse in Leeds on one occasion, uh, a consignment of, um, bulbs came,

[00:25:43] Uh,

[00:25:44] in a, in a case, and, uh, one of the attendants decided that he would test them to see whether they were all alright.

[00:25:54] So

[00:25:54] he fired one.

[00:25:57] and 50 flashbulbs, because

[00:26:01] they had to be in contact with each other. If they were separate, it didn't work, but when you put them side by side, they were sympathetic.

[00:26:11] Paul: What

[00:26:11] happens? 

[00:26:13] Stuart: Well, the whole lot 

[00:26:14] went 

[00:26:14] off. A whole box full of, um, flashbulbs, and they weren't cheap at that time. 

[00:26:22] So 

[00:26:23] really, 

[00:26:23] that was, that was the basic equipment which we used to

[00:26:29] use.

[00:26:31] And

[00:26:32] it was all,

[00:26:33] it

[00:26:34] was all, uh, 8x6.

[00:26:37] Sometimes it was 10x8.

[00:26:41] The, uh, the railway engines, which we used to photograph for the Hunsley's Engine Company

[00:26:47] and hudderswell Clark's in Leeds, we always used to use 10x8 for those. Now it was interesting there because we used to have a particular date for going to photograph them. And

[00:27:04] they were all finished up in black, white and grey paint. Because that served the cost of retouching the finished print.

[00:27:15] There was very little photography done at that time. Apart from views and so forth. But anything that meant a machine, a lathe the, or whatever, it always had to go to the process retoucher who airbrushed the reflections or put one or two, put a shadow in or whatever it is. It was a highly skilled, uh, process. Uh, process, retoucher with white lines and so forth. But the interesting thing about these two railway engine companies was. that they only painted them on one side, the side that was being photographed.

[00:27:59] Paul: And

[00:28:01] Stuart: we used to go back to the studio, develop them straight away, yes, the negatives are alright, as soon as that happened, then they would strip all the black, white, and grey paint off and finish up in the customer's required, required colours.

[00:28:23] Paul: Wow.

[00:28:25] So, so the bit that strikes me is retouching has been part of this art 

[00:28:30] Sean: a long time. Well, 

[00:28:33] Paul: I mean, think about

[00:28:33] it, right? Because we, there's a lot of debate about retouching and post production. That rages. Even now, but when you think about a manufacturer only painting one side of a train, they're painting it colours that repro well, and then it's being handed on to a retoucher, retouching's been going on for a very long time. 

[00:28:51] Stuart: Well of course, everything at that time was, was, um, retouched, and most portraits finish up with complexions like billiard balls. There were no shadows, etc. 

[00:29:03] Paul: haha, It's like nothing's changed! 

[00:29:07] Stuart: Indeed. Indeed, and, and when people speak now in condemnation of, oh well you can see the retouching and so forth, well the only thing that you have to do now is to make sure that it doesn't show. But, it was, really when Photoshop and the like came in on the scene, this was manna from heaven.

[00:29:32] Paul: Yeah.

[00:29:33] Stuart: Because it cut out the need to do the work on the actual print. To retouch transparencies was a rather different process altogether.

[00:29:48] And it was 

[00:29:49] Sean: difficult process to be

[00:29:50] Stuart: Oh yes, and very highly skilled. And the firm that I worked for, Giltrous Brothers, who were the photo engravers, they used to retouch twenty, twenty

[00:30:02] four, twenty glass plates. Whereby, when you talk about printing today, and I think the, uh, top of the range, uh, Epson, Uh, printer works in, uh, we're printing 11 colors, but the, limited edition photolitho, uh, illustrations were, uh, certainly on, on 13 colors

[00:30:36] And from 13 separate plates. All of which were retouched.

[00:30:42] Paul: So

[00:30:42] the plates were retouched separately? 

[00:30:45] Stuart: correct? 

[00:30:45] Oh yes. 

[00:30:46] Paul: Wow.

[00:30:48] Stuart: So

[00:30:48] Paul: each of these plates is a black and

[00:30:49] white plate that's going to take one color ink?

[00:30:52] Sean: Correct. I understood the

[00:30:52] Paul: the process right?

[00:30:53] Sean: Yeah. 

[00:30:54] Stuart: process, right? Retouches were earning more than photographers at any time. 

[00:31:01] Sean: It's most interesting to hear this, Stuart, because you come into my era when I was learning photography and the discipline of the transparency, the 4x5 and 8 inch transparency, and of course there, retouching was an anathema because if we retouched the transparency, we started to lose some quality.

[00:31:17] Stuart: Yes. we to, it was a period of photography, I think, more than ever, when we had to get everything right in the camera because the client demanded the transparency. Whereas the processes you were using enabled this retouching method, which is very, very interesting.

[00:31:29] There are certain elements, as you well know, with your, even with your skills, whereby there are elements which cannot be lit out or exposed out or 

[00:31:43] whatever. And there has to be some artwork, or whatever you call it, retouching done. And at the end of the day, most of the photography which, which I was taking and involved with, was going to be reproduced. And so if it was retouched at source, before it got to the retouchers on the reproduction, uh, side.

[00:32:11] of the plate making, then that was, it was as we wanted it rather than what they thought it should be. 

[00:32:20] Paul: As ever photographers being control freaks. 

[00:32:24] Stuart: Well, after something like two to three years at Picards, by which time I got a fair amount of idea of what's going on. 

[00:32:37] Um, I decided that, um, I ought to seek pastures new and became a staff photographer for the 600 Group Of Companies just on the west side of Leeds. And there I photographed secondhand machinery, which they used to recondition and I photographed the, lathes and milling machines, drilling machines and that sort of thing, and they were then printed on and they, all these were taken on the half plate camera, which is half the size of a whole plate camera, obviously, um, and, um. they were made on 6x4 glossy prints, and these were distributed by the appropriate department to potential buyers. And I was there for three and a half years. But I'd got to the stage where I'd photographed everything that didn't move, and I was becoming rather dissatisfied with life. So I 

[00:33:49] Paul: Do you mind if I ask how old are you at this point?

[00:33:53] Stuart: this point? Well, let me see, I would be about, twenty, twenty four, twenty, what, twenty five. Right. Twenty five, six. 

[00:34:03] Paul: Right.

[00:34:04] Stuart: I was dissatisfied because I didn't think I was getting anywhere.

[00:34:09] Sean: So you were, you were ambitious, really, to take your photography on to another level and, and have more control, would you say, over what you were doing

[00:34:16] Stuart: you could say that, yes. just say to work for yourself, Stuart? 

[00:34:20] Sean: The Thing is that the, the company that I worked for. was part of the A. H. Leach corporate, uh, company at Brighouse, which was, uh, a very big organization with studios in Cambridge, Manchester, Glasgow. Um, and the prospects of moving to any one of those places was stalemate because they were well staffed was no flexibility for moving, and so I thought, well the only way to see whether I am a capable photographer was to make it on my own, see if I could make it on my own. And in fact started the business in some premises now occupied by the local library. down at the bottom end of the village.

[00:35:19] Stuart: But this was going on for some time, two or three years, and then the question of getting married.

[00:35:27] came into the reckoning, and this house in which we're sitting now became available, and very suitable because the front room lounge in which we now sit became my portrait studio.

[00:35:46] And across the top of the window, which is facing opposite you, was a bank of Kodak, um, lighting with five, four 500 watt lamps in each for general illumination.

[00:36:04] And So then I had a spotlight which is, was behind you for lighting the hair and then a fill in light on this side. And by this time, we'd moved on to two and a quarter square, real film cameras, 12 on 120.

[00:36:22] I hadn't really at that stage got into, back into the industrial scene because I was doing social photography, weddings and portraits, to build up a reserve of capital to move on to buying more advanced equipment.

[00:36:44] And the changes at that time were considerable. 5x4 were on the, on the fringe. At the time that I'm speaking of, German 9x12 plate cameras were still being used for press photography. And there they were, on the touchline at Heddingley, these, the local press photographers, with box of 9x12 single shot plates freezing to death, and um, and that's it, one off shots.

[00:37:26] But I missed the point earlier on, I think, of saying that uh, every shot had to count. And, over the years, that has influenced me considerably, because I've always made sure that everything was right before I took the exposure.

[00:37:48] And whatever the, whatever the occasion was, whether it was an industrial scene or a social scene, you look at the subject before you, to begin with, and then start looking round and see what's happening in the background. Because, if you do that, it saves retouching, and that's an absolute classical instance of today, where people, when Photoshop came, what about so and so?

[00:38:22] Oh, don't bother about that, I'll take it out. I can take it out in Photoshop, and I've heard speakers come to the Institute and talk about, Oh, I do this and do that, and I've said, well, how long does it take you to do that? Oh, well, a couple of hours or so, like that. It could have all been addressed in the taking, and that would have been eliminated.

[00:38:51] And when you talk about 2 or 3 hours retouching, well how much do you charge for, oh well I'll throw it all in.

[00:39:00] And the number of people who I've heard say that, oh well I'll just include it. I think they've got a bit wise to it now because Uh, any extramural activities are chargeable by the hour, and, uh, and it's certainly in need of that, but what I would say to any in, up and coming photographer, they need to sure of what it is that they're taking to avoid having to retouch it afterwards, albeit that in today's terms,

[00:39:40] With the relaxation of dress and disciplines and so forth, Um, I don't think it quite matters. And so, I think as far as today is concerned, I would find it difficult to go back to being a photographer in today's terms. Because, I can sit in a restaurant or in a room, somebody's room or whatever, and I'm looking at the, the vertical lines of the structure to, to see whether that line lines up with that, and it's surprising how often I can see lines that are out, even buildings.

[00:40:27] I could see buildings that, that were not, um, vertical. completely vertical and line up with the I sit there looking at the streets and doors and windows and it's very, it's very difficult to get out of that discipline into the much more free and relaxed attitude towards photography today.

[00:40:56] I don't know whether I, whether you would agree with that or not.

[00:41:00] Sean: Stuart, I would agree with what you're saying and it's like the photographer's eye, your whole life has been trained by your eye viewing scenes and viewing situations and it's quite impossible to turn that off really.

[00:41:10] That's part of you and how you see things, so no, I couldn't agree with you more. So Stuart, tell me, you obviously, the room we're in now was your studio, and you're in here, you're now married, you're doing more social photography, as you said, and obviously starting to make money. Where did the business go from there?

[00:41:29] What was your sort of next stage really? Because I believe you had another studio then in the village, is that correct? 

[00:41:35] Stuart: The children grew up and we were running out of room space,

[00:41:40] So an opportunity came in the main street down the road to take over a building, um, which I was able to use the ground floor and turn it into a studio, a reception studio and darkroom. And, uh, during that time, I was doing, um, mainly social photography, but also, I had got associated with the local newspaper which circulated in this area, and I virtually, without being on the strength, I virtually became the staff photographer for the whole of the circulation area.

[00:42:32] So on a Saturday in the summer, it was not unknown for me to do perhaps 11 cover 11 eventualities such as garden parties, a flower show, etc. and also fit in a complete wedding. So,

[00:43:00] Paul: So, 

[00:43:00] Stuart: so

[00:43:01] my time, my, my mind used to work like a, like

[00:43:07] a clock, uh, a precision clock, because it was, it was timed to the nth degree. Um, what time is the, uh, what time is the wedding? How long will the service be? Where's the reception? And I had a mental, uh, mental, uh, memo of the distance from here to there, and the length of time it takes to get from, from there to there.

[00:43:36] And, as far as the, as the newspaper is concerned, I tried to take a different picture. at each occasion, so that we don't want the same picture of women serving tea, uh, for the WI, the church of this and that and the other. Um, I tried to make a different picture. So that training and experience fitted me in good stead for when the industrial scene tailed off.

[00:44:15] Sean: I've just, uh, I've just, um, picked a photograph up here.

[00:44:18] Stuart's got quite a number of his photographs in the room with us here. It's a very nice PR, press type shot here of Harry Ramsden's Fish and Chips shop, and it's got a very 1980s mobile phone and the world famous in this part of the world, Nora Batty which some of you may know from a famous last of the summer wine tv show and i think this is to do with the flotation of Harry Ramsden because it became quite a successful company didn't it so talk a little bit about this photograph Stuart it's very captivating and i think very very well executed

[00:44:50] Stuart: Well, the story as you've already identified, I'm surprised that you have, because that was when they went public. And, uh, the, story was the Harry Ramsden fish restaurant, which, it was the center of all activities, just on the outskirts of Leeds, and they, as you said, they got Nora Batty there, who was a very leading personality at the time, and, of course, telephones, you can see the size of that, that mobile telephone, which is about the size of a half of a brick. Um, this was the, um, the story. And the essential thing was to locate the seed of the picture with the name of the, the company. across the top of the, the print or the format.

[00:45:46] Sean: And if I could just butt in there Stuart just to say sorry to do this but I think it's important to get this across that I've just picked this image up and the story has come straight across to me. We've got the mobile phone. You've got the Financial Times, which is holding the fish and chips. You've got the sort of banker type chap behind her.

[00:46:02] It just shows the skill that's gone into that picture, that an image is telling that story to me all these years later. Because I presume this photograph is 30 or 40 years old, Stuart. Am I correct there? 

[00:46:12] Stuart: It's quite a long time. And the essential thing about that picture, uh, Sean, is that however much a sub editor chops it down. There was always be something of the story there, because the nearest or the furthest down that they could chop it would be across the top of the bloke's head, but it would still say Harry on the left hand side.

[00:46:42] And, and, that was the, the art of, at that time, of getting the story across for public relations. Include the company's name or the brand in the background somewhere so that it had to be seen and it couldn't be taken out. 

[00:47:03] Paul: I ask you a question? Have you always loved being a

[00:47:06] Stuart: being a photographer? Oh, absolutely. 

[00:47:09] I wouldn't do anything else. Um, had a very enjoyable life in every aspect of it. And I'll tell you one thing about it, and Sean will agree with me on this. Photography, photographers are in a very privileged position, and they don't realize how much so. Because so often, they are in, at the ground floor of activity. A conference, a confidential conference projecting the aims of the company.

[00:47:46] I was in a company when I was in the conference actually, when the whole of the regional bank managers were in a conference at Harrogate, and they were told then, that we were going to dispose of the buildings, our assets, and I photographed several banks which were up for sale and they were simply being sold off. The managers didn't know. What's the photograph for? Oh, it's just for the estate. I knew what they were, why they were selling it. It was going on the market.

[00:48:25] You know all these little convenience grocery shops and so on, on filling stations, I was in the conference there for all the ESSO managers in the region, when the the project was put to them that we're going to put these little kiosks, or whatever it is, and, and, and there I was. Um, and we were privy to information that was light years ahead of the actual official announcement.

[00:48:59] Paul: Yeah.

[00:48:59] Stuart: Metahall, for instance, um, I was in the conference when they were talking about what their footprint was needed to be to make that viable. And there are several instances such as that. And you do get it to a more personal level, where we've got, uh, injuries, personal injuries to photograph.

[00:49:26] Oh well, what about Snow?

[00:49:29] Well,

[00:49:29] And you just can't get involved with passing that or repeating that information.

[00:49:35] Paul: Yeah.

[00:49:36] Stuart: It's confidential. And as I said, photographers are so often right in the heart of things. And I'm sure, Sean, that in today's terms, you'll be more exposed to it than I was with them.

[00:49:51] Sean: Well, very much so Stuart.

[00:49:52] Very much so. Yeah. I mean, it's, I can't tell you how many NDAs I've signed in my career, so, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. 

[00:50:00] So Stuart, so you've now got the studio, the, the biggest studio now on in the, in the, in the village here. And you're obviously doing your social, your weddings, you're obviously doing a lot of PR.

[00:50:11] Did you start to do, did the industrial photography come back a little bit more as well?

[00:50:15] Stuart: Yes But I was, I was extremely fortunate and the odd thing about it was that the connection came through the, uh, the work of the local paper because three miles from here was the control room for the Central Electricity Generating Board and they were having an open night and the local paper was invited to to cover the, the event. So I went along and took a few photographs of whatever was going on and had a bit of a look around the place and subsequently then I was approached by their, their public relations department for the northeast region. Would I take a photograph of something else? 

[00:51:13] From that stemmed the work, which really became the mainstay of my activities with the Central Electricity Generating Board.

[00:51:26] Again, I wasn't on the staff, but I was vir, virtually became the staff photographer for the Northeast Region. And the amazing thing is that here I was, photographing power stations, the grand openings of power stations, starting with Thorpe Marsh, which was the, down in Doncaster, which had two 400 megawatt sets, which were the f The Forerunner, they Thorpe Marsh was really the testbed for the, um, the 400 megawatt stations which followed.

[00:52:13] And there again, this was being in on the ground floor whenever there was a fault down there or whatever. or a problem, um, I was called in to, to, to take the photographs. 

[00:52:27] Sean: So

[00:52:28] Stuart, would you say that, um, he's very interesting listening to this about how your business built. Would you say that networking was a great part of building your business?

[00:52:37] Stuart: Networking, well they call it networking now, and it's, it's contacts really. And I think, I'm sure that you'll agree that being in the right place at the right time, and that really applies to anything, the theatrical world, et cetera, and, not necessarily knowing the people, the right people, but getting on with them, and being able to mix with people, and behave in a way that people expect you to. So 

[00:53:10] Sean: Would you have any sort of advice or tips for a young photographer or somebodnew breaking into photography and how to. build a business? Have you anything to add there at all? 

[00:53:22] Stuart: I think that in today's terms, it is extremely difficult for photographers. And I'll tell you why, because I think that the opportunities which I just mentioned are remote, probably remote in the extreme. Social photography is something else, and the, the website, and all the various media opportunities, with which I am unfamiliar and have no knowledge of because I've not had the need to do it. But I am aware because I look at what people are doing. And that's another instance of success. Of keeping an eye on what other people are doing. If you admire anybody's particular work, then that sets the example and the criteria to work to. But as far as going back to contact is concerned, I have the distinct impression now that not only photography, but everything now stems from public Relations and I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but if there's, if there are any problems, on the one hand, of people's behavior or their activities, or whatever it may be, adversely or favorably, and the promotion of brands and industries and business, it all seems to stem now very much from the agencies. 

[00:55:12] If you read question of the so and so company are going to introduce this product or

[00:55:22] service or whatever it is, or they've taken over a business. the

[00:55:27] statements attributed to the managing director or chief executive or accountant or whatever it is, right across the board, a great many of the people that are being quoted, I would suggest, are not capable of speaking and thinking the way that the statement appears in print. And it raises sometimes, a lot of suspicion as to just what is behind this thing. This business with the post office. It's full of it. And so the point that I'm making is that advertising agencies, that's another one, the advertising agencies are in direct contact with the, um, with the brand or the company.

[00:56:24] And so the opportunities of the photographers, in my judgment, are minimized because of the hold. that the advertising agencies have on the job. 

[00:56:43] And 

[00:56:43] they, 

[00:56:45] they will say who they want and who should be employed. They may think them best or otherwise. And it also then comes down to, rights, and I bet you are right in the thick of this, that, uh, you are the, the favorite bloke on the, on the block, and whilst ever that person is engaged in that company, your situation is secure. But suddenly, if he goes to pastures new, and they've already got their established photographers, as far as you're concerned, you've lost that company.

[00:57:28] Sean: Very 

[00:57:28] Stuart: company. 

[00:57:29] Sean: very true. Yeah, yeah. 

[00:57:30] Stuart: Is it true?

[00:57:31] Paul: But there's always opportunities with these things, I mean, in the end, there are more photographs being created today than ever historically, I think you're right about the structures of advertising agencies, though this isn't my world, when someone moves on, there's an opportunity, and there's always the opportunity to stay as well, there is risk, of course there's risk, but equally, you could be the guy he takes with you.

[00:57:54] So how do you make that happen?

[00:57:56] Sean: Well, I think it's very apt because I've had two or three key clients in my career that have moved numerous times, you know, seriously big companies and they've taken me with them, yeah. And not only that, in some cases, they've taken me to their new company. And it's gone well. They've then moved on to another company and taken me with them, but the company they've left still retains me.

[00:58:19] So there's a benefit that way. But I think it's really, I greatly believe in the, in the networking, keeping in touch with people, making an effort at all times. And I think, I know we've got today's digital world and there's lots of advantages to that, but also personal contact I think is still really, really important.

[00:58:38] Relationships and personal contact.

[00:58:40] Stuart: What you are saying is, is correct. And I remember an uncle of mine who was a milkman and, had a, a big dairy, and he once said to my mum, oh, well, it's so and so, he's come again, a rep has come. It's been three times, so really it deserves an order.

[00:59:03] There's a 

[00:59:04] lot 

[00:59:05] Paul: in

[00:59:05] Stuart: a lot in

[00:59:06] truth in that, backs and it backs up what you were just saying, of keeping in contact, and, of course as far as advertising is concerned, or mail shots. the first one they take no notice of and throw away. The second one, oh well, there's another one from this so and so. The third one, it is usually reckoned that the person will be activated by that And so, as you said, keeping in contact is very important.

[00:59:42] But I'm bound to say that breaking in a lot of it is by accident, but certainly the persistence of contact is very important.

[00:59:56] And when you consider, you see, over the years we have thought of Only the Institute, or I have, and I've done, I've put a lot of time and work into it, as other people have, without which we might have been a lot more better off or a lot wealthier than we in fact are.

[01:00:20] Sean: Stuart, did, did, when we say the institute, it's the British Institute Professional Photography we're talking about here. And I, I'm a member too, and that's how I met Stuart through the institute. Through your long career as a photographer, how important did you find the, The Institute and the ability to mix and talk and, and, and work, you know, get information from other photographers, I suppose.

[01:00:41] How important did you find that 

[01:00:44] Stuart: Photographers, um, are, as you know, very, very much individualists. they work a lot on their own, and when you consider that there are probably 7 or 10, 000 practicing photographers in this country, and so few of them belong to anything. 

[01:01:10] It makes you wonder how all those people survive. but, it really comes back to, to, uh, what we were saying earlier, of contact, those people must be in contact with other people.

[01:01:29] Their reputation goes before them, obviously, and when you consider the situation with the Royals, for instance, who, from time to time, have official photographs taken, um, by names that I've never heard of, where you would perhaps expect that they are members of the, this organization, the Royal Photographic Society, as a case in point. Um, these people are not members of them and so how they I'm not talking about the Litchfields, I'm talking about the other people who officially, officially photograph, uh, in recent times, the, um, William and Kate's family, the, their birthday or whatever anniversary it was. So, those people, um, are plowing their own furrow.

[01:02:33] But going back to the the meaning of the institute, whereby people are individual, the opportunity over the past years was for all these individuals to rub shoulders with each other and the networking that went on then. For instance, you go to a meeting and you're chatting away, and a couple of blokes have a common, common interest, uh, uh, or they're equal practitioners, but suddenly, one of them comes up with a problem that he can't answer, and so he's able to phone this guy in Nottingham, or wherever, because he is not in competition down the street. He can't ask the guy down the street how to tackle the question, but the man in Nottingham will willingly bare his soul for you, and keeping in contact with, um, with other people to solve problems where they have them is incredibly useful, in my judgment. 

 

NOTE: to see the rest of the transcript, head over to https://masteringportraitphotography.com (it exceed the normal limit for podcast texts!)

So what does it take to be successful (at least as a portrait photographer?) In this episode I muse on the key building blocks that every successful photographer I've encountered seems to exhibit, at least to varying degrees!

This episode also features a quick catchup with Andy Blake from Kaleidoscope Framing (https://www.kaleidoscope-framing.co.uk/) who have been our supplier for nearly twenty years.  Why?  Because their products and their customer service are second to none!

The PMI Smoke Ninja Photographic Competition is now in full swing - deadline is 5th May so what's stopping you?  Head over to 
https://pmigear.com/pages/smokeninja-portrait-contest to read all about it.  The Smoke Ninja is genius! Actually, it should be called the Smoke Genius...

I also mention Datacolor's excellent products in the podcast, in particular the Spyder Cube, the Spyder Checkr Photo and the Spyder Checkr Video - they can be found at  https://www.datacolor.com/spyder/products/ We have used these products for years and years and I would never go on location without them!

 

If you're interested in any of our workshops or masterclasses, you can find them at https://www.paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk/photography-workshops-and-training/ 

 

Enjoy!

 

Cheers
P.

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If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

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If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

 

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Transcript

EP151 What does it take?

[00:00:00] Meet Andy: The Heart of Kaleidoscope Framing

[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Andy I'm the general manager at Kaleidoscope.

[00:00:02] Tell me a little bit about Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope. Okay, so we're coming up to our 26th year in business. We are a bespoke picture framer, mainly for the photographic industry, so we basically can make anything you want. So, as long as we can actually build it, we'll do it, it's as simple as that.

[00:00:18] Why Kaleidoscope Attends the Photography Show

[00:00:18] Tell me why you come to the photography show. So we come to Photography Show, uh, mainly to obviously try and drum up more business, new customers, but also see our existing customers and show off our products, ideas, what we can achieve, what we can do, and try and inspire photographers into what they can tell and display their work like.

[00:00:36] Andy's Passion for Photography and Its Impact

[00:00:36] Why do you love the photography industry so much? I've always had a passion for photography. I know we've spoke before on your podcast, uh, from a young, young age. Um, don't do as much of it myself anymore. Uh, unfortunately, uh, more involved in this side. But I love photography in terms of what that moment can capture.

[00:00:54] What you can hold that freeze frame, that image for time. Um, and look back at it. And just, you know, it's memories, isn't it? You're capturing memories, you're capturing happy moments, sad moments, uh, important moments, lots of different memories from people's lives at different times, so.

[00:01:09] Uh, if you could change one small thing, or one big thing for that matter about this glorious industry, what would it be?

[00:01:17] That's a tough one. I don't know. I don't know what I'd change. Um, obviously for us, for us as a company, I'd change in terms of trying to encourage people to sell more products. That was what, that's what we would change, uh, in terms of helping us as a business.

[00:01:31] But it's, in terms of the industry? Sorry, on that note, I'll stop you and we'll just drill into that a little bit.

[00:01:38] The Value of Physical Art in a Digital Age

[00:01:38] Do you think that photographers understand the importance and the role that finished artworks, whether it's in albums, which you don't do, or whether it's in a frame, as opposed to the fleeting pixel base like phones, iPads, TV screens, do you think they understand the difference and the importance of it?

[00:01:57] Not everyone, no. I think there's an element where in a day Very digital driven world. Social media and images being on screens, and I think a lot of people don't realize how different an image can look when you put it up on the wall, when you print it big, when you put a mount around it, put a frame around it, put it onto a canvas, laminate it.

[00:02:15] There's so many different options or ways to display that image. I think when you see an image framed up, we. Customers where we print their images and display them here, uh, as you've seen yours, and I'm amazed actually how often people, the first thing they say is, I didn't think it would look that good.

[00:02:30] I never thought it could look that good. And, and it goes to show that actually displaying it large, printing it and putting it onto some paper can make such a difference to seeing it on screen, seeing it on the back of the camera, whatever it may be. So, and by extension, I've got a few clients that say they put their, these frames like in a.

[00:02:44] Position of prominence, not necessarily visibility, but somewhere they'll see it every day, like the top of the stairs, or somewhere they, you know, walk through a hallway or something, and they enjoy that moment, they relive those memories every single time they look at a frame, and that's something I think digital products don't do, they're much more fleeting.

[00:03:02] No, I'd completely agree with that. We moved into our new house in December, and I'm still trying to get frames on the wall, and it's the one thing I'm missing. In our old house, we had lots of frames. Of lots of small frames with lots of captured memories and, and I used to love it walking past the stairs and you'd see 25 frames on the wall, lots of different things.

[00:03:17] And now it, we don't at the moment. So that's, I'm driving for that because it does, it, it, it brings back that, that memory, that spark, that emotion from that moment.

[00:03:25] Thank you very much, Andy. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you.

[00:03:28] Honestly, it's one of the greatest things about being a part of this industry is the people I've met along the way. And Andy. He's definitely one of them.

[00:03:35] The Busy Life of a Portrait Photographer

[00:03:35] I'm Paul, and this is the mastering portrait photography podcast.

[00:03:40] So I've been in London this afternoon, we've had such a chaotic few weeks. It's nine o'clock at night. Actually it's half past nine at night. And I'm sitting on my own in the studio with just the whirring of the heating. And a couple of disc drives, chattering weight in the background. And if I'm honest, I've just found myself asleep at my desk because finally I've managed to get myself back into the habit of doing some exercise.

[00:04:19] And so when we got back from London tonight, I hopped onto the Peleton and did an hour, but all it's actually happened is I'm just exhausted because it really has been a few weeks and it must have been because I haven't recorded any podcasts and that's in spite of me, not just promising. I suppose all of my listeners, but promising myself. I would do more and I do them shorter, but actually the reality is finding the space, not just the time I suppose, but the headspace to sit and do a podcast. Well, it's just alluded me a little bit.

[00:04:55] So it's me. I'm on my own. A little bit of peace and quiet and I think at the moment, Things are a little bit like playing Mario carts. I love Mario karts. Cause once you get to know the course, you get to know where you're headed, what's coming up, what you've got to do. But in spite of that, well, usually my family, uh, throwing stuff at me, banana skins Inc.

[00:05:18] Shrink me. You name it?

[00:05:20] The Art and Business of Photography: A Personal Journey

[00:05:20] Um, but then there's also those boosts where you get that little bit of extra energy and off you go, and I think running a photography studio. Is a little bit light that. It's kind of crazy. It's full on. You're running at a hundred miles an hour. Things are thrown at you that in spite of the fact you think, you know where you're going and what's coming up next. Well, life doesn't work that way.

[00:05:41] So what's happened over the past. What's it been? Three and a half weeks, I think since I released a podcast. Uh, in that time we've done nine client reveals, which has been a really nice, hugely successful, which is lovely. Uh, we've done 15 portrait sessions, which means there's a whole load of reveals coming up. Um, we've judged the monthly for the BIPP, which is something I absolutely adore doing. Um, I'm chair of the judges. Uh, chair of awards and qualifications for the BIPP.

[00:06:10] So I'm not strictly speaking. Judging. So I get to be a part of the process and I really enjoy that. Uh, cause it takes a little bit the pressure off Sarah and I coordinate it. And bring it all together and make sure everything's running smoothly and keep an eye on the scores. But in the end, the pressure's not on me to analyze all of these images.

[00:06:28] Having said that though. Uh, over the past couple of days, I've been judging for the Photographic Society of America. Uh, which is a blast as he seeing some work from around the world. Uh, the BIPP though it is an international organization is predominantly a UK photographers, but the photographic society of America is exactly the opposite of that.

[00:06:47] In fact, I'm not sure how many UK guys. are in it. And so to see work from all over the world. And he's just a real pleasure. Um, Don two shoots for the Hearing Dogs, including photographing, uh, Chris Packham. TV presenter and natural history sort of buff. I suppose it was a wonderful thing, actually.

[00:07:09] I didn't know quite how I'd find him, cause it's never, you're never certain when you meet people, who've been on TV. Uh, quite what they're going to be like. And he's quite outspoken about various things, but he could not have been a nicer guy. And at the end of all of the shooting, we sat in a park and had a quick, it was a Coke. I say it was, it was a pub, but we had a diet Coke at a hot chocolate.

[00:07:31] And do you know what. There was a window. There was a window in exactly the way I describe how to set up light in the studio is it was, it could not have been more like a one meter square softbox and so I persuaded him to sit and we had a chat about photography and production and all sorts of things. Uh, and I took a couple of portraits of him using window light in a pub.

[00:07:55] Exactly as I describe how I learned today. So that was lovely.

[00:07:59] Uh, we've done five wedding pitches so far I've lost one, but one, all of the others, which I think is pretty good going. What's that 80% I'll live with 80%. The one that I lost was one that. You know, when you get a pitch. And your instinct is always to want to win.

[00:08:16] That's just inbuilt. But it was a job I couldn't figure out. Whether it was going to be tricky. And I'm not going to say more about it than that because I don't, I, you know, I don't want those prospective clients, if they happen to listen, to the podcast. You know, obviously they've decided to use somebody else or to go somewhere cheaper.

[00:08:36] Actually, I was too expensive. The price we put in was too much. Um, and they were lovely people. Absolutely brilliant. And I would have loved working with them. But the job was such that it would have meant cancelling, some other bits to do it. A couple of, um, Extended stays and a few of the bits and pieces.

[00:08:53] And I think in the end, I though I lost it. And of course you never, ever, ever. I want to lose work, my suspicion is the time that it would have taken. We'll drop a couple of portraits shoots in there. We'll stand, you know, we'll, we'll learn about the same kind of revenue for probably a lot less work in the end.

[00:09:11] So hello, 80%. So I've lost one, one for. Uh, I'm going to live with that. That's pretty good.

[00:09:17] Embracing Change and Challenges in Photography

[00:09:17] Ah, I've almost, almost completely finished, ripping out. I say a ripping out. It makes it sound like a gutted, the place. Uh, reorganizing the studio. Uh, for the Elinchrom kit that we now have, because of course, I've got to take out all of the existing adapters. Change out all of the, um, any of the sort of third party kits.

[00:09:38] So we've sold all of the Profoto equipment back to, uh, the Pro Center in London. Got a good price rate. So that's makes me very happy. Sarah drove that into London and deliver that safely to those guys. So thank you to them. Ashley for having a brilliant service. They took it in on a Friday morning, checked it all over. Uh, and paid us on Friday afternoon. Um, which was really useful.

[00:09:57] I sold it as a job lot in the end. Because it was easier rather than trying to split it up. A few people had shown interest in bits and pieces. But, you know, it's just, sometimes it's just easy. I took a slightly lower price. And offset that against the fact it was an awful lot less. Uh, an awful lot less worry and effort on our part.

[00:10:18] So Sarah drove that in, but of course I've got a ton of adapters. Softboxes kit that is sort of, I dunno, got ox or aperture, different manufacturers that were all based around Profoto in of course now I've got to change all of that over, put new adapters on. So that, um, I can use the as the light source.

[00:10:38] And on top of that, all of the charges are very different. All USB C, and they're great. I wasn't certain how I was going to react to having. USB C charges everywhere. Uh, but I bought a couple of very long cables. for them and, they're 60watt. I mean, they're pretty meaty these things. I'm going to have to remember not to leave them plugged in.

[00:10:56] Cause I don't know quite, I got to get a measurement on them because I don't know if they're left, plugged in whether they're still generating or absorbing that kind of power because they're digital transformers. So they must be absorbing some power. But they're great. And you can run the lights off them continuously, or you can unplug them.

[00:11:13] And of course their batteries. Uh, but more on the, on the telecom side in a bit. Uh, another thing that happened is that a friend of ours, who's a wine collector. Everyone should have a wine collector as a friend. I delivered on, uh, where was it? Beginning of the week. Must have been Saturday. He delivered six more. Of the wine crates, the wooden wine boxes that he gets his really valuable, very beautiful wine delivered in, and they are amazing for storage, but also great as props. So, um, that was really, really nice. To see him and also to get these crates.

[00:11:47] So it's helped me organize. Uh, stuff in the studio. Uh, also, I, I saw some video there's some behind the scenes footage of one of our workshops. And there's a pan around and it's brilliant. It's vibrant and it's fun. But I looked at just the ount of stuff we've got in the studio. And made the decision there and then that we needed to get some of it out of there.

[00:12:08] So I've been redistributing things that don't get used quite so often as other things that then are scattered around the studio, probably never to be found again, I'll be scratching my head one day thinking now where's that particular softbox well, that particular modifier where's the beauty dish con the things that I don't use very much. Where are they? Uh, and I've got to go on a hunt in the attic. Uh, to find them. Uh, what else?

[00:12:31] We've written three or I've written three magazine articles, one for NPhoto magazine. One for Digital Photographer, magazine, Digital Photography. Uh, magazine and one for Professional Photo magazine says three in one week. I had to turn. That was quite lively. A lot of writing, a lot of scratching my head about the different things. Eh, love writing.

[00:12:52] I'm loving, writing more and more and more. I've surprised myself. I think I've certainly, I would surprise, surprise my English teacher. If only he knew the effect that ultimately many, many years. Uh, down the line, he had had a lot of fun that, so please do look those guys up that's NPhoto, which is the unofficial Nick on magazine. Uh, that's also assay, technically I've written four. I'm just thinking I've also written a piece on print and its place in this ever. Digital and file based industry and why actually a lot of us still use it. Uh, that article. Is part of a whole debate in the BIPP magazine, in The Photographer. Uh, magazine, but look up Professional Photo it's online look, up NPHoto, and also an article isn't out yet, which is about the bit I've looked after is about switching digital backgrounds. Uh, in Digital Photography magazine.

[00:13:46] We've had two one-on-one coaching sessions or master classes, which is always a blast because you get to spend the entire day just figuring out stuff with one person, a couple of models on each different things, whether it's off-camera flash or whether it's dedicated to daylight or both.

[00:14:03] Of course, when it's only one person. You can do whatever you want.

[00:14:06] Uh, we ran one of our workshops in Oxford, which is the, uh, walking around the streets, looking for interesting places to photograph workshop. I said a name for it. Uh, streets. It's not really, I don't like calling it street photography because street photography is a thing.

[00:14:21] And it's not that it's finding places, finding light, figuring out how to create imagery and how to invent shots when all you've got is the space you're in the face in front of you and the camera in your hands. And I love working like that. In fact, today I sit to sound away in, so on the way in for the shoot I'm doing that, I was doing some headshots for a Harley Street, um, clinician.

[00:14:43] She's a psychologist in London. And I was doing some headshots in Harley street. And so Sarah and I packed up. Uh, the two, two of the Elinchrom lights into the rucksacks, couple of, uh, small, soft boxes. Camera gear. A couple of stands in case he wanted a white background and plowed our way into London.

[00:15:02] And I was laughing with Sarah as we hold this stuff. Through the station and into a cab. Is I lay you a bet. We don't use any of it. I'm just going to use one camera and a big grin. And that is it. And sure enough that's exactly what happened. So in spite of me taking all of this kit in all we did was just have an absolute blast with one person laughing our way through it. Taking pictures I'm using daylight is in the light for the windows in her Harley street, uh, consulting room. Out in the street itself. Uh, on the steps and things like that.

[00:15:36] And it was just brilliant. And that's exactly what the, the workshop in Oxford was about. It's about where, when you find yourself and who you find yourself there with, what do you do?

[00:15:45] The Importance of Storytelling and Community in Photography

[00:15:45] Uh, another thing I've done this past couple of weeks is had a presentation to the Village. Uh, Society.

[00:15:51] Yes, Hunnam has a Village Society. You couldn't make this stuff up. It's like Midsummer murders is brilliant. A room full of, uh, retirees, mostly one or two of my clients as well. That's quite a few of my clients were in there. Uh, all sorts of people came. A busy room in our local library. And on top of that, my mum came now, my mum is a legend. Uh, she's an absolute power of nature is my mother. Uh, but it's the first time I've done one of these presentations or with my mum in the room.

[00:16:21] I'm not going to tell you the whole story, but there is one bit of it where I show a photograph of my mom and dad actually. And it's a photograph that Dorling Kindersley wanted to use and they wanted to use it on a book called Sex And The Older Couple. Uh, of course I never, ever, ever. Let them. That, that image was never going anywhere near, uh, the cover of a book.

[00:16:43] Uh, but it's the first time I think my mum has ever seen me do that routine. And it's, it's really, uh, it's just me laughing about photography and imagery in telling stories. And it's just one of those stories. And of course, it's my mum and dad who I think the world of, and they're the people that gave me. Well, they gave me everything. And so much of the confidence, I guess. And the drive to do something. Whatever it is in life to do it and do it well. Comes to my mum and dad's having a moment.

[00:17:09] The audience was a real privilege. Uh, because she now lives here in the village with us, but it is a little bit weird. I'm doing a presentation that I've done over and over and over it though, at least that particular story over and over and over. Uh, my mom's in the audience. She didn't look too surprised. Uh, I don't know.

[00:17:26] I don't know how she felt about that. Particularly. It's a shot of course of my dad who died 10 years ago. Um, this year. Uh, we've also, uh, we're working with a couple of people. We filmed a new video.

[00:17:37] So we're working hard on creating new content for mastering portrait photography, not just the podcast. But the training materials and the videos. And so we've spiked that we've gotten, we're getting some more people involved. We filmed one new video. We had to took two filming days to do it. Absolutely exhausted. I was so tired at the end of it.

[00:17:57] Maybe that's why I've just found myself asleep at the desk. Um, and we started to work on our social media and all sorts of other bits and pieces. Just trying to get on to get things out there. Uh, it's hard when your primary objective, you know, if you've ever seen Little Shop Of Horrors and there's the, there's the, what's the, I dunno what it's called, but it's the, it's the monster plant. And he says, feed me, Seymour, feed me now. And they were running a photography business is exactly like that.

[00:18:29] We have one client. And that's the bank account because you have to keep running. It doesn't matter how many other things you have in the pipeline. Or things you want to do or ideas you'd like to explore or portfolio images you'd like to retouch in the end is a huge, great plant. Just going feed me Seymour, feed me now. I was laughing with Sarah today. Everything we do in, you know, all we have to have is one phone call that says, can I get five days of paid work from you?

[00:18:56] And you drop everything and go do it because you have to. And that's the reality of this kind of business. You don't turn down work or at least, I mean, maybe that maybe some of you who are listening are in a privileged position. Where you can and you do. I'm not in that position. When work comes in, we take it.

[00:19:13] We do a good job of it. And we get it back out to the client and then we sit and go, right? Where was I? Here I am recording that podcast. Uh, what's the Dune Part II actually with our daughter. I don't know if anyone's seen it is brilliant. I've no idea what was going on. It was excellent. He was. An absolute mystery to me.

[00:19:33] Um, over the past week, couple of weeks I'd spent watching. Uh, Dune part one. Uh, trying to understand, because of course I never watch a film properly. I sit with a film on my second or third monitor on my iPad while I'm retouching or writing for a magazine or something. It's in the background. It burbles in a background.

[00:19:52] So usually I can't watch anything with too much of a plot. Uh, but Dune part one, well, I kind of passed by, it was really pretty. I think I understood some of it. There appear to be some telekinesis kind of stuff and some mind reading, he kind of stuff. Lots of sand. Uh, and then I went to the cinema to watch Dune part two.

[00:20:12] Now, what I will say is it's worth the watch. Brilliant. Big screen. Theater 7.1, Lucas, whatever THX, whatever it is, sound. Huge bucket of popcorn. A large thing of diet Pepsi and on top of everything else. Uh, class a beer. And then I realize after about two hours, That I've got another three quarters of an hour to go because it's a long film and I've got the bladder. Of a 55 year old bloke because that's how old I am. This, all of this came to a bit of a head. Now I stayed put in my seat, but honestly, by the time we got to the end of the movie, I was sweating. I was sweating beyond sweating as the first pixel of the first credit. Appeared at the bottom of the screen. I made a run for it.

[00:20:59] Well, I'll tell you what I was still peeing. When pretty much the cinema was closing. People came and went. I think people got married, had children celebrated anniversaries in the time. I was like that scene. I've Austin Powers. I've never been so pleased to get inside the gents. So I'm sorry if that's a bit lewd, but you know what I mean? Uh, when you're in that sort of, oh my God, I've got to go now. Uh, but it was brilliant. The film, at least the first three quarters of it. I paid a lot of attention to, I think I was getting a little bit distracted by the end. There's a lesson, a beautiful people. If, if you're going to watch a really long film, Don't drink too much. Anyway, it was great. Uh, now what I need to do is watch Dune part one again. In the context of having seen what happens now, I'm that guy anyway, a very often, if a film is or a series or. Uh, you know, a box set or something is stressful. Drama. You know, tension, those kinds of things. I will hop onto, uh, something like, uh, I MDB or Wiki and do a plot spoiler because I don't need to stress.

[00:22:01] I do the same with books. If I'm watching, if I'm reading a book that I think is a bit stressy. Then I'll go to the back couple of pages and read them, just went out what happens and then I can enjoy the plot knowing what's coming. Don't ask. I just don't like the stress. I don't need it in my life.

[00:22:14] I have enough stress in my life. I'm a photographer. Life is stressful enough. Without me adding extra stress by watching something that, uh, I don't know what the ending is going to be.

[00:22:26] All right.

[00:22:26] Exploring New Horizons: Reviews and Competitions

[00:22:26] Uh, in the middle of all of this, this is a message from our sponsors. Well, not really sponsors. I'm not paid, by anybody, but I have had a few things sent my way to review and have some fun with, uh, and the first of those is the Smoke Ninja.

[00:22:41] So this has come from PMI company called PMI. I will put the links to all of this in the show notes, but PMI very kindly sent me a piece of kit I'd already bought from them on the CA. On the Kickstarter. Campaign it's the Smoke Ninja, which is a tiny EDBD. You can't believe how much stuff comes out of it. Fogger.

[00:23:00] It's absolutely incredible. So this thing we've had this for a while, talked about it before, but I've, uh, I now have two of them. Excellent. Great fun. But it's all to do with a competition they're running and I'll give you the URL now. So it's, if you go to PMI smokeninja dash portrait dash contest.

[00:23:22] So. HTTPS colon slash slash usual stuff. P M I gear all one word.com/pages/smoke. Ninja will one word. Hyphen portrait hyphen contest. Now they have a contest and I'm just bringing it up now on my screens. And there's $10,000. They say total prize pool. There's a prize for the best solar portrait. There's a prize for the best wedding portrait.

[00:23:47] There's a prize for the best family portrait. There's a most creative award and there's the most viral award. Everything has to be done. Uh, or rather everything, everything you do for the competition has to use either the Smoke Ninja or its bigger brother. The Smoke Genie. Uh, you have to do some behind the scenes footage of it.

[00:24:06] Send up your final picture and the behind the scenes footage to prove you were actually using their equipment to do it. I think as well as it giving some social media content, you have to put, you have to upload it to there. Their portal, as well as putting it on your own social media feeds. So it's a great competition and the prize is absolutely stunning.

[00:24:26] Unveiling the Prize: The Smoke Ninja and More

[00:24:26] Uh, each prize has $500, $500 us dollars. Um, The cash, uh, but also has, uh, some stuff from, I don't know how to pronounce this is Yoon. Um, some stuff from Small rig and you also get the smoke genie pro kit. If you're a prize winner.

[00:24:45] Exploring the Wonders of Smoke Ninja

[00:24:45] And the smoke genie. Uh, is like, oh, I miss the Smoke Ninja, but on steroids. Now we've been having a blast with the Smoke Ninja recently.

[00:24:54] It's a really good bit of kit. The only thing we've had to learn how to do here is to disable all of the smoke sensors. So that's actually been a little bit of a head scratch. Is figuring out how to turn off the smoke detectors in the studio before we use it. Because the last thing I need is the fire brigade turning up to find me sort of with a family or a teenager, flinging smoke around and laughing my head off.

[00:25:15] Uh, I'm not sure that we'll go down that well. Uh, but that's the, the competition and I in return for them sending me, uh, the Smoke Ninja. I've also got to enter the competition as well, but if you fancy it, so it's PMI gear.com/pages/smoke, ninja portrait contest. And I'll put that. Uh, in the show notes that, so it's worth a worth a look.

[00:25:37] And I can honestly hand on heart say that the PMI. Uh, Smoke Ninja is well, it's just, I would call it the smoke Genius, not the smoke Genie or the Smoke Ninja

[00:25:47] . I think the thing is absolutely fab. And even the other day, when we were filming the video we've created is actually I ran the fogger as a hazer.

[00:25:56] So just so I had a little bit of haze in the air so that when we put the lighting across the studio for all of the pieces to camera, it just adds atmosphere. Uh, it picks out little bits of light and it just softens those backgrounds. It's. It's it's only when you start watching how a film. Directors and directors of photography and lighting engineers use this stuff.

[00:26:16] You kind of think, oh, okay. That's something that's entirely applicable. In our world to photographic stills, photographic world too. So. Head over to them. Have a look at that competition. If you're interested. Uh, you might just, you might just find some inspiration for some angles on photography. Maybe you haven't thought about.

[00:26:32] Diving Into the World of Color Calibration with Datacolor

[00:26:32] Uh, the next one is Datacolor also is it's been a couple of weeks of stuff arriving.

[00:26:38] I think I mentioned this in the previous podcast, but Datacolor sent us the Spyder Checkr, the spider, sorry, the Spyder Checkr Photo, the Spyder Checkr Video and also. Uh, thing of genius, the Spyder Cube. Now this is one of those gadgets. So. The color check is I've used a Datacolor. Spyder Checkr Photo or the older version of that. For probably, I don't know, six years, seven years, maybe even longer at the beginning of every one of the shoots off site, because obviously once you've set it up for your studio, I don't need to recalibrate this.

[00:27:10] I've changed the lens or a camera on my lighting, which of course I'm doing right now. I don't need to recalibrate, but every time I go out into location, We take a safe shot with the Spyder Checkr Photo as it is now called. And I'd be doing that for a very long time, so that I've always got a reference point for my white balance and for my color. So the color spectrum under the lighting that we're using. well the Spyder cube is sort of the next level genius.

[00:27:36] It gives you not just your white point and black point. There's a hole in it. What. Uh, brilliant idea. There's a hole in it with no lights you get. So that should be exactly the same darkness is the nostrils. It's just dark. Uh, but it's also got white and gray and a mirroball on the top or a little Chrome. Uh, marble, it looks like a little Chrome sphere. And that, of course, if you were lighting, it gives you your white point because it shows you your specular highlight.

[00:28:00] The thing is great. It's absolutely brilliant. And of course, as we've just done right now, we are, re-engineering all of our lighting. So I now have from Elinchrom, four Fives and two Threes, and I am loving it, but not just because the light that these, these bad boys are giving is stunning. But on top of that, we've used the Datacolor Spyder Checkr Photo to calibrate all of the new gear in our studio.

[00:28:27] So have profiles in Light Room for the new Allyn crumbs. And although it gives you a very flat finish, which is not my look. It gives you a very, very accurate starting point. So I just thought I'd put that in there. So thanks to Datacolor for sending me that kit. Um, if you have the opportunity head over to that Datacolor with no 'u', by the way, it's a American English, or I suppose these days international English. Uh, as opposed to the British or English, English, C O L O U R.

[00:28:54] It's not that it's da as you, but I'm sure you know, it C O L O R a Datacolor. It's worth going to have a look. The thing's not that expensive. It's less than a hundred pounds. It's only about 40 quid for the spider cube. Uh, and then the spider checker photo inspire the checker video. We're all in that sort of 90 quit. Mark, I think anyway, it's very kind to them to send it over and, uh, I will put out some, uh, befores and afters on some of our feeds as to just how good it is.

[00:29:20] And of course, having had. All of the new Elinchrom lighting and the Elinchrom theme is going to run for weeks. So we'll leave that. I won't talk any more about that on this particular episode, but rest assured the four Fives and two Threes. I am having a blast. It's so nice. To have stunning light back in the studio.

[00:29:40] Absolutely loving it

[00:29:42]

[00:29:42] The Building Blocks of a Successful Photography Business

[00:29:42] anyway, onto today's little, sort of the actual bit, the rest of it. I'll tell you what the diary of a working pro is getting bigger. Uh, um, I need to fix that. I need to do something about that, but at the moment, it's just because the episodes are so far apart, a lot has happened since the last one. So this, the theme of this particular episode, and I was puzzling over this. Uh, or rather what triggered it was a series of conversations and the reviews from our Oxford. Workshop and I kinda been chewing on what is it that makes a successful. Photography business.

[00:30:23] What is it? What really is it I'm still working on? I don't have an answer. I doubt there is an answer. But what I have observed is there are building blocks. You need. And sort of you stack them up. I think. And on the top of it is you as a S as a successful photographer or a successful. Photography business, but you build it on certain pillars. And the four I've kind of identified, and this is based on S on feedback and it's based on observations. That I've made as well. You need, I think the following four things. At the very least you need the following four things.

[00:31:04] The Essential Attitudes for Success

[00:31:04] Anyway, you need energy. Optimism enthusiasm. And confidence. Now you'll notice in there. I haven't said camera craft or. And I for an image or I dunno, technical knowledge, or I, I've not said any of those things, you do need those things. By the way, it's not that you don't. But underneath that. To learn to be able to absorb ideas, to be able to push through. The fear and doubt that is inevitably part of this world.

[00:31:35] You need energy, optimism, enthusiasm, and confidence. And these are things. That I'm very blessed. To have I'm lucky in that my parents gave me those things and on the whole I've normally got, I'm going to say I've normally got three of the four. It's any one moment. There are days when I have no energy, but I'll be optimistic that I'm going to get it, get it there the other day.

[00:31:56] There'll be other days whenever turn of energy, but it's being in channeled entirely in pessimism. Um, there are days when I'm not enthusiastic, but it doesn't stop me thinking tomorrow will be better. And there are days when I'm, I have no confidence at all. But I'm still energetic and optimistic and enthusiastic about I, what about what I do now?

[00:32:16] I could probably do a podcast on each of those things. And maybe in the future, I will maybe I'll interview. Some photographers and talk about these various aspects, but why, why have I brought those out when I could have said. You need to understand cropping. You need to understand your color wheel.

[00:32:34] You need to understand how to process digital images. You need to understand how to use your camera when all of these things are undoubtedly. True. But if you don't have the energy and if you don't have the opt or more importantly than enthusiasm, I think you'll never get around to learning those skills.

[00:32:52] They just will never arrive.

[00:32:54] Before you even start. You have to have energy, optimism, enthusiasm, and confidence. They are the building blocks. They're the attitudes. Maybe that's what I should have called to maybe attitudes there, what you need. I think. And I've never met. Uh, top flight photographer, successful photographer. Now by top flight, I don't necessarily mean award-winning images.

[00:33:16] I mean, people who've been successful in the industry. Some photographers are successful because their business just. Fly. Some people are successful because they are amazing on stage. Some people are successful because they images. Or well, simply glorious. There are lots of reasons why a photographer may or may not. Be successful.

[00:33:37] So when I say a top flight photographer, I mean, someone who's known for some aspects, some skill, some quality. In industry and every single one of them that I've ever met. Shows energy, optimism, enthusiasm, and confidence.

[00:33:53] So let's have a think about what each of these. Uh, attitudes sort of are. So energy and having energy doesn't mean you're bolshy or pushy, or like a bull in a China shop. It doesn't mean that it just means. That, when it comes down to it, when you pick up the camera, there's something about what you're doing. That drives you, that keeps you going because there are going to be days when you really aren't feeling it. And it's your energy. That you need to draw on.

[00:34:22] Now for me, I'm kind of lucky. In the, when the client walks into the room, they give me the energy that I need. Somehow, no matter how flat I am, how tired I am, how fed up. I am sometimes. When the client appears, they give me energy. That energy drives everything. Sometimes I'll be honest.

[00:34:43] My own insecurity gives me. Energy when I'm having one of those days and I'm not feeling it. I don't often get to the point where I'm like, you know what, I'm done it, it does happen. People have to talk me out of it.

[00:34:56] But sometimes my own insecurity is all of the energy I need. But always when a client walks in, that triggers something in me and off I go.

[00:35:06] Optimism. Optimism is I suppose an odd one. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone else write down optimism. Um, certainly in the reviews, no one's ever said optimism is not a word.

[00:35:16] I think the associate. With any of these conversations normally, but here's why. Here's why I use the word and I don't mean in optimism. I don't mean unrealistic. So I don't mean that you late. I don't know. You think you're going to always make a silk purse out of a sow's ear? To use the expression. I just mean. It's that thing of, well, let's give it a go.

[00:35:42] What's the worst that can happen. You know, I'm a photographer, not a brain surgeon. So the worst damage I can do is to take a crappy picture. That's essentially it. Now, if you're doing a wedding, okay. That's a little bit more pressure, but if I go, if I get it wrong, I'm going to make someone look fatter or older. Or thinner or. I don't know, less attractive than they think they should be. Those basically are the limits of the damage I can do with a camera.

[00:36:10] Let's say drop it on someone. I suppose I could drop the camera from a great height and it would cause damage. Um, so having optimism is almost baked in why wouldn't I have optimism? Let's take a picture and see what it looks like. But I have met a lot of photographers who don't exhibit that they're nervous of trying things that. They think might fail and I think it will make. They think it will diminish. They're standing in front of their client, whereas I'm, I think the other way round. Is that I think the client loves it when we try things.

[00:36:42] And I'm very open about stuff I will say to the client, look, I don't know if this is going to work, but you know, let's give it a go. And if it does work, I'm going to show you, I'm going to. Claim credit for it, and I'm going to enter it into awards. If it doesn't work, you're never ever going to see the image.

[00:36:58] And that's basically it. Um, optimism is about the idea that you can. And that today, what do you know what I will. Uh, enthusiasm, enthusiasm runs through me most of the time. And it's a, it's a derivative of energy. Rarely, I suppose I could have fused. Those two words, but I think you can be enthusiastic without being energetic and vice versa. He can be energetic in your pessimism if you want to be.

[00:37:24] So enthusiasm has a real place for me and enthusiasm. I found when I'm in, in the company of a photographer who is enthusiastic about what they do, who is full of positivity about what they do. It's it's captivating and you kind of get drawn along on that ride. Now I don't mean naivety. I don't mean. That. You're enthusiastic to the degree that we can know what could happen.

[00:37:51] I'm not saying that. Similarly with optimism, you know? I'm just saying that if you're enthusiastic about what you're, what you do it carries now, does that mean all of your pictures have to be happy, bubbly pictures, new, not at all. But it's much easier to take enigmatic, gentle, moody pictures. When you're being enthusiastic about it than when you're not trust me on that. Uh, so enthusiasm is what it is.

[00:38:16] And I think I've every successful photographer I've ever met is enthusiastic about what they do now. Occasionally you time it and you talk to them and they're like, they're not being very enthusiastic or optimistic for that matter. But on the whole, you feel that they would be the rest of the time.

[00:38:32] Confidence, Feedback, and the Art of Adaptation

[00:38:32] And then there's confidence. And now confidence does not mean. Arrogance.

[00:38:37] And it certainly doesn't mean. That I don't have, or the photographers I've met don't have insecurities or imposter syndrome or all of those words they do. They really do. But something in them. Says that it's going to be all right again. Allied to optimism, having the confidence to say, I know what I'm doing. To ground yourself with the camera in front of your client and say, it's fine.

[00:39:04] I know what I'm doing. And I know I can do this. Or having the confidence to take. Feedback critical or otherwise to take. feedback from your peer group or from your client. It takes confidence and it takes. To an extent, a thick skin. I think I might've missed an attribute. I think sensitivity might be an attribute that I should add to this.

[00:39:26] Let me think about that. I'll come back to you on that. one, but having the confidence. To say, yeah, I can learn that. Or having the confidence to take. Feedback in a way. That you turn it into a forward facing energy. Oh on the Peleton tonight. Honestly, I have done an hours exercise. That's like nearly a thousand calories burned, which is why. He likes snoring.

[00:39:48] I've lit. Honestly, I'm not kidding. I woke up at my desk. Uh, with the microphone over my head. Uh, waiting to record. Um, and that's because I've done an hour and it's been a long week. I submitted an article last night, or this morning at three o'clock in the morning. I submitted one of the articles much as I love writing.

[00:40:04] Uh, sometimes the inspiration doesn't come until the wee small hours. As my Scott's friends. Uh, I would say, um, anyway, during the exercise class. That was on tonight.

[00:40:16] One of the instructors said, there's this thing called? Yes. And now I've never heard of this as a thing before. Yes. And not. Yes, but, or no, but, or no. Yes. And. And that's having a confidence to take feedback in a positive way and move forwards with it. There's a scale in and of itself giving everyone knows that giving feedback in a positive way. Is a skill, but I don't know how many people think that. Taking feedback is a skill.

[00:40:49] It's a practiced. Skill to know how to take feedback and. Extract or distill what's useful. Actually is a lot of confidence. And I come back to the same thing. Don't get me wrong. Of course there are days when I'm absolutely terrified. There are days. When I can't feel it, there are days when my confidence is not for whatever reason, you know, it, I'm not at all saying you disassociate. From your normal character.

[00:41:20] And my normal character is I'm very, very confident in what I do. And I'm confident in my ability to learn stuff. I'm a quick learn. I can certainly do that. And I'm very good at the yes. And. But it doesn't change the insecurity. When you show an image and somebody doesn't like it, there's still that burning sensation. That you get when somebody points out something

[00:41:44] , if you go to any art gallery, any and have a look at people, enjoying the pictures. Isn't it curious how some people will head towards one artist and others will head towards another artist. But they don't always like the same artists. And that's similar to photographers and feedback. So having the confidence to give feedback and take feedback is a thing.

[00:42:06] Having the confidence to stand in front of a client and say, Genoa, I can take this picture. Don't worry. You're fine. Giving confidence to your client through those actions. Well, that's the thing I think. So these are your building blocks.

[00:42:20] You've got energy. Optimism, enthusiasm and confidence. And I also think. You have sensitivity in there. You're going to have to leave that one with me. I thought of that while I was talking. Why does that happen? Why is it just as I think I've got my podcast nailed. I've got my things I want to talk about. During the actual recording.

[00:42:38] I think of one item thought about. I think sensitivity might well be in there. If it is, I'll bring that up in another. Another podcast because having empathy and sympathy, when you're a portrait photographer, I don't know if that matters when you're out there doing landscaping, but this is the mastering portrait photography podcast.

[00:42:56] And so I guess that's, pertinent.

[00:43:00] So you need those things

[00:43:02] . Of course, you also need practice. You need perseverance and hard work. You need creativity and your craft. They don't go away. But in my experience, Those things are built. . On your energy, your optimism, your enthusiasm, and your confidence without those. You'll do no work. You won't have what it takes to pick up your camera and develop and push forwards and change and evolve. And that's another thing, , having those four things.

[00:43:31] I'm going to go back to the four. I think. Having those four things gives you what you need to be adaptable and pliable. It gives you what you need to develop and change. And trust me in this world. Particularly now AI has arrived on the scene. You're going to have to adapt and evolve to be competitive in this market.

[00:43:51] Not just as a business. But visually too, because what's out there in terms of the visual arts is changing at a pace. We have never experienced. It's changing at a pace. When I did my PhD in AI 25 years ago, nearly 30 years ago. That could not have envisaged where we were going to end up. We talked about this stuff back then as a fantasy and here it is. You know, type a few key words into half a dozen of the different image generators. And just see what comes back,

[00:44:22] Wrapping Up: A Look Ahead and Gratitude

[00:44:22] but on that happy note, On that happiness.

[00:44:24] I hope that's. I. I'm quite curious about this episode. I hope that's useful. I might write this one up as a, an actual article kind of thing. Uh, thank you for listening. To the end. Um, please do go across to PMI Gear. To Datacolor and to Elinchrom, all excellence suppliers of the stuff we use here at our studio. Uh, we stuff I use with enthusiasm, energy, optimism, and confidence. Now, it just sounds really corny.

[00:44:50] I'm so sorry. Uh, but please do go ahead and look up the competition. Uh, it's a really cool one. I will be entering mostly because it gives me a chance. We've got someone coming in on Sunday. Uh, to, uh, create some, uh, very fogged work. Can't wait for that, but thank you for listening to the end of this podcast.

[00:45:09] If you've enjoyed it, please do subscribe wherever it is. That, uh, you consume your podcasts. Thank you to the people that left us reviews last week. That's been quite a few. It's been really rather lovely. Um, if you do feel like leaving us a review, please, do we read them all wherever we can find them?

[00:45:24] The most obvious place of course is iTunes. I represents about 60% of the world listening to podcasts at the moment. I believe anyway. Uh, so please leave us a review and a rating up there. If it's a review where you think I should change things, uh, then please do email me. Don't write that in a review.

[00:45:42] Nobody wants to read that. No matter how confident I am, it stops me being optimistic. Uh, so please do email me. It's Paul at paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk dot co.uk. That's Paul. Uh, Paul Wilkinson photography.co.uk. Uh, also head across to the spiritual home of this podcast and mastering portrait photography podcast.

[00:46:02] And of course that home is mastering portrait photography.com, where there's a whole heap of articles and ideas, all dedicated to the business, the craft, the art, the creativity, and well. Frankly, the enjoyment of portrait photography. We're about to hit that with some reorg. I talk about that in the coming weeks.

[00:46:22] Um, and some new content, uh, we changed in the way that's all working while I'm in the process of putting together thoughts on how we're going to change that. Uh, hence the fact we're now filming videos, uh, on a more regular basis. It's all quite exciting. There's a ton of stuff going on. Hopefully I won't be asleep at my desk with too much of it because frankly that's a big waste of time. But until next time stay awake and whatever else. Be kind to yourself.

[00:46:48] Take care.

Yay! Other than a crappy cold, a very good week.  Won a Gold Bar with the Guild Of Photographers a couple of days ago which got me to thinking about competitions: why we do them, how to do them and the fear of failure (when in fact, the only failure is to not enter at all!)

There are one or two other things to bear in mind and I step through them in the podcast.

Enjoy!

Cheers
P.

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If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

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Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] I'm really sorry, it's just been one of those weeks. I have spent three days, three whole days at home feeling ill and mostly grumpy. Sorry, I don't take to being poorly particularly well. Whatever Michelle and Sarah had last week. Of course, I inherited it this week. It turns out that the word viral is not a joke.

[00:00:25] It's just a cold, really, but it's been quite a horrible one. It hit my chest straight away, and I just felt awful, and if I'm honest, after three days off work this evening is the first time I've really felt sort of compos mentis. I've spent three days sitting in the lounge with the fire on. It's been cozy enough, but I've, I hate being unproductive.

[00:00:46] I hate not getting through the lists that I've got to do. I hate the idea that I've wasted three days, but in the end, that had to be done. So as I sit here next to the fire watching back to back episodes of Law Order, I'm Paul, and this is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast.

[00:01:07]

[00:01:20] So I hope you're all feeling a little bit better than me, and in terms of the catch up of the week, well, I can't really say that I've done that much out of the seven days or so. Three of them have been spent laid up doing very little. Obviously, I'm still doing some coding, writing emails, and an awful lot of judging has been flowing through my world. Not this time, not just as a judge or as a chair of judges but also as a contestant. It's been an interesting time.

[00:01:47] So, I judged for the FEP this week, the first of the final rounds of their annual image competition. I'm one of the judges on the portrait category.

[00:01:58] 647 images, I think, were there to judge. And if you think about that as a volume of judging and all of our, all of the judges. Whether it's for the BIP that I chair for, whether it's for the SWPP, the Societies, whether it's for the Guild, whether it's for the FEP, the World Cup, it doesn't really matter what the judging is.

[00:02:19] It takes time and we do it for nothing. Well, I say nothing. We don't do it for nothing, but we do it for free. And so, if you think about all of that, 647 images. If I went at it hell for leather and judged one image per minute with no breaks, that's still basically 11 hours of judging, which is an awful lot when you think about it.

[00:02:45] And yet, we put ourselves through it. And I do it because I really enjoy it. I really love the process, I love seeing the images, though there is some disappointment when we're judging and the images haven't come up to standard. But, nonetheless, it's cathartic, it's inspiring, it's very therapeutic, it's quite a rhythmical sort of thing to do.

[00:03:04] And I really love it.

[00:03:06] On top of that, if that wasn't enough, the results to the BIPP monthlies came out the first BIPP monthly round. So this is a new competition for us. We've set it up to run parallel to the print competition, which opens up in sort of June time and it's judged in September. And they run side by side and they are different beasts.

[00:03:27] So the print competition, exactly what it says on the tin. Submit your prints in the category. Best print wins each category. That's it. Very simple to do. The monthlies are not that. The monthlies have been designed.

[00:03:41] to reward consistency as much as really high quality inspirational work. With a print competition, you only need to shoot one image, and depending on what everybody else shoots, you could end up with the title of the print image of the year, the portrait print of the year, the wedding print of the year, whatever it is.

[00:04:00] With the monthlies, it's been designed not to be quite like that. The monthlies It's about consistency more than it is about that one high scoring image. That's not to say that a high scoring image isn't a thing to be treasured and will get its accolades, but what we've done is design a competition at the BIPP, which is Sorry, the BIPP is the B I P P, the British Institute of Professional Photographers.

[00:04:27] So we've designed a competition that runs for 10 months of the year. And we take, for every photographer, the top scoring image of theirs in each category. So it doesn't matter how many images you, you enter, that's irrelevant. Each month, we're going to take, for that photographer and each category they've entered, their top scoring image.

[00:04:47] And over seven of the ten months, we're going to accumulate those scores. So you have the opportunity, if you wish, to take three months off. So you have ten months, take three months off if you wish, seven months. So your top seven scores for each category will be accumulated. So your top seven scores in portraits per month.

[00:05:09] So in January Portrait. You enter five, we take the top one. February. You enter five in Portraits again, we still take the top one. And that's, that's two of your scores sorted. And the reason we're doing it that way is that each photographer in the BIPP gets one free entry every month.

[00:05:28] So you have for free the ability to enter and win the monthly's competition for the year without laying out a single cent. All you have to do is find the time at the end of every month to pop in a high quality competition level image, upload it, put your name in, Bob's your uncle, Fanny's your aunt, off you go, you're done.

[00:05:47] And you could win it.

[00:05:48] So what amazes me, and there's a point to this story, not only is this how it works, but the point is, why don't more people enter? We had lots of entries, but it's not everybody, and I can never quite get my head around why, if it's free, and you have the opportunity to create some great PR, I'm looking at the PR on Facebook this week, and on various websites and Instagram, and people are really celebrating their success in all of the monthlies, not just the BIPs, and it's brilliant, and that's what it's designed for. It's designed to give photographers the opportunity to have something to celebrate and to share with their clients. This is, in the end, about clients. I think too often in the industry we think about it as being about, it's about photographers, and it's not really.

[00:06:31] It's about our clients. And the monthlies create every 30 days or so, the opportunity to share success with your clients and you can do it for free. So why, with the thousands of members do we have, do we not have every photographer entering?

[00:06:48] Still can't get my head around that and if you think I don't put my money where my mouth is.

[00:06:54] This month, I did enter as I have done for the past year, I entered the Guild Monthlies competition. Obviously, I can't enter the BIPP competition, because I'm chairing the judging. So I entered the Guild, and this month, for the first time since I've been entering it, I got a gold bar, which is nearly the top standard.

[00:07:12] It's not the top standard. The top standard is Platinum. But nobody's won a Platinum yet, so I'm happy with that. I got a gold and won an image of the month. Now, that's not the point of this story. It's not really to brag. Though I am really pleased with myself because it's an image I took of I think it's the bass player from the band The Sweet.

[00:07:31] He was very cool. He was in our studio. It was just a normal session shot I took for him. all for the band. And I decided to try it, enter it as a competition, and see how we go. I think the point is that I entered. I gave it a go. Now, people get really nervous about entering competitions, and I don't really understand why.

[00:07:51] Now, you know my views on this. Competitions are not the best way to hone your skills, because you get no feedback, and even if you produce the best image of your life If your competitor has produced the best image of their life, they may just win. and give you nothing really, no, certainly no winning image to celebrate.

[00:08:13] Also, you know, with the judging process, you don't know how you're going to do. Every photographer enters an image thinking they stand a chance. But judging is what it is. We've got to rank all of the images and who knows? Maybe it doesn't do as well as you'd expect. And people take that really personally.

[00:08:30] I take it really personally. But the difference is I still do it. I just don't tell anybody I'm doing it. I do it quietly. And the images that succeed, well, I celebrate those and we publish them. And Sarah in particular loves it because it gives her an opportunity to talk to our clients and put out some PR.

[00:08:47] And she's been doing that all day since the result came out yesterday, which is fantastic. So, I give it a go, I do it. I don't always do that well, if I'm honest, and judges typically, they, there is a correlation between the judges and success in competitions, but it's nowhere near as marked as you'd think it is.

[00:09:08] And you can see this while we're judging. So if I'm chairing a panel of judges, you'll see marks from each judge fluctuate quite widely. So a challenge is triggered when one judge's mark is 10 away from the average decision. So whatever the judges came up with, we take the average, and if one or more of those judges is 10 marks different, we have a challenge.

[00:09:29] And we have plenty of challenges, which tells you quite a lot about the fact that every judge has things that they are looking for, and if the image that is in front of them doesn't have it, they won't score it as highly. Equally, if it does have those things, they will score it highly. There is volatility in scoring.

[00:09:46] You cannot use print or image competitions. as a measure of you as a person, or you as a business, you as a creative, but when you do win, celebrate it. When you don't win, well, you have to figure out what to do with that. The great thing about a monthly competition is that there is the opportunity for at least a little bit of learning.

[00:10:10] because you don't have to wait for a year to try again, you can just wait four weeks. Re enter some more images, keep an eye on what comes back, what gets into the bronze, silver or gold. If you haven't quite made it across the line, what makes it into the the commended, which is what we have at the BIP. I don't know what the other societies do for those things, but everybody has a sort of way of doing it.

[00:10:31] So the trick is, celebrate your wins, keep your losses to yourself, and then there's a whole load of pressure removed for you. So It is slightly different in in the monthlies. So, back on, I'm gonna bang on this drum. If you haven't entered into one of the monthlies, into any association you're part of, why not?

[00:10:52] What's stopping you? Think about it. What is actually stopping you? It's almost certain, almost certainly rather, a fear of not doing well. Well, I enter them every month, I tell you when I've done well, and I keep it very quiet when I haven't. And I'm still amazed at how few people do it. And with the BIPP, every entry is £5, but you get one entry for free.

[00:11:15] And with the BIP, every image is £5 a go. But you get one for free. So that's a value of £5. So if you had entered 10 months of the year, that's £50 worth of free entries.

[00:11:27] Who's going to turn down 50 quid over the year? And the value of the opportunity to talk to your clients is priceless. Now you can argue you might not win, and that's true. I don't. But when I do do well, I will share it. When I don't do well, quiet. I just keep it nice and quiet.

[00:11:45] So the results came out for the Guild yesterday, so they're on the 21st, and the closing date for the Guild is at the end of the month, so it's a leap year, so it's the 29th of Feb. So I've got about somewhere between 8, 9, 10 days every month between the results to the previous month coming out and the new round to choose what I'm going to put in.

[00:12:06] I know I'll keep entering and I know I'll keep learning and I will keep being surprised at what does well and what doesn't even though as a judge and as a chair of judges very often I'm in the position of determining that and even having just judged the portrait group for the FEP, the Federation of European Photographers, I can tell you now when the second round comes back to me in a couple of weeks I lay a bet. The images that come back will not be in the same order as I pick them out. That's life. I'm working with judges from all over Europe, I'm working with people of different tastes, different influences, different things they value in an image. So you can never be certain, but what you can be certain of is if you don't enter it, you ain't gonna win anything.

[00:12:48] That's a dead cert. So why would I choose absolute certain failure over anything else? Sorry, you never use the word failure. It's not a failure. Nobody fails. Except when you don't enter. Yes, you do. You fail. You've failed to enter, you've failed to compete, in which case, failure is the only word I have for it.

[00:13:07] If you enter and your image isn't successful this time around, there's a million factors to that. You can learn from some, you might not learn as much as you'd like, you can take those images because you have them. And you can show your mentor, or show a friend, or show another photographer, or show someone get a critique.

[00:13:21]

[00:13:21] So there's just a few things I have spotted over the past week to ten days. with competition images. This is accumulated from what I've seen on the judging side with the BIPP, or the BIPP Monthlies, and what I've seen from the competitor side, so as a judge rather than as a chair, on the FEP.

[00:13:41] One, don't over sharpen, particularly when it's an online entry. The screens tend to be quite sharp. They tend to make things look a little bit sharper than perhaps they could be, in my opinion, anyway, maybe it's the screens I've got. So don't over sharpen. No one on any competition I have ever been involved in the judging has ever said they've under sharpened this image.

[00:14:06] But every round I will hear someone say, that image is over sharpened. Don't overdo it. Alongside that There's a huge temptation, particularly with the users of Lightroom to use clarity and or detail enhancement. These are still, so there's no such thing as sharpening, it's just localized contrast.

[00:14:24] Equally, clarity and detail are variations of the same thing. If you're quite keen on the clarity slider You can see it in the image. It starts to look like it's been heavily processed. For some categories, that's great. For some categories, that will get hugely rewarded. For others, it won't. So have a look at what's done well previously and tune your effects and your clarity and detail to suit that.

[00:14:51] Don't blow out your highlights or block up your shadows. What do I mean by that? I don't want ever to see pure white, and that's tricky if you've got, let's say, a grey flat sky, and you've lit someone against what light there is. So get it under control, make sure there's detail in the highlights, and there is detail in the blacks.

[00:15:09] And don't think you can cheat by raising up the blacks to be grey. Thinking, well that's right, nothing in the image is now black. If there's no detail in it, we're still going to see that the blacks were blocked up, they've now just become very dark grey, and still blocked up. If there's no detail in there, I would suggest you find an alternative image.

[00:15:32] Colour grading. A lot of colour grading knocking around, and there are a thousand colour panels out there at the moment. Be careful, that the colour you're using is part of the story you're trying to tell. Don't just make it desaturated because it's desaturated, or make the shadows a bluey green because you've seen it on a Netflix film.

[00:15:50] Tell the story with your colour. If you're going to use colour, tell the story through it. Be careful that you don't just process for processing's sake. It must be part of the storytelling.

[00:16:00] If this podcast makes you feel uncomfortable because I'm sounding ill, trust me it's worse for me. I'm sounding ill. Where are we? Next one, number five, look for emotion, and then number six, impact. These two are intertwined. When you look at an image as a judge, we have to react to it.

[00:16:20] Judging as a process gets criticised a lot as to why don't we prioritise creativity, emotion, impact, these words. Sort of soft, the soft skills, I suppose, of photography. The truth is, we do. That is the top scoring band. Impact. Bam! Get it in front of us. Work out what it is about the image.

[00:16:43] Whether it's the way you've cropped and formed the story, where you've laid out the parts of the puzzle, where you've used colour, the way an expression just connects with you as a viewer, whatever it is. Make it about impact, because as judges, we want to feel something. We want to know that you felt it, too.

[00:17:02] Number seven, do not enter the same images everywhere. I kid you not, there's an image I've judged I won't say exactly where, but I've judged it this week that I've seen now four times. Four different competitions, I've seen the same image. I wasn't always the judge. I was a fellow contestant in one.

[00:17:22] I was Chair of Judges for two, and Judge for the fourth. I've seen it four times. Well, imagine the lack of impact by seeing it that many times. Now I know, as a contestant, you may not think the same judge is gonna see it every time. But, the truth is, there aren't actually that many judges. Not really.

[00:17:45] So there's a lot of cross talk. So you get to see the same images quite a bit, if you're entering them into different competitions. As an extension of that, and this is So the first one's not that easy to avoid if you enter lots of competitions. It would be great if you could, prep a different image from the shoot for each competition, but I know it takes time and it's expensive if you're doing print, but I would still recommend it.

[00:18:11] This next one, though, is slightly different. If you shoot images in series, what do I mean by that? If you shoot dogs running and jumping, one dog running and jumping, or you shoot a certain style of child portraiture, or a certain style of I'm talking portraiture in particular, a certain style of female portraiture, I don't know.

[00:18:31] Don't put more than one of that style into any round of a competition at one time. Don't put them all in January. The idea that we're going to pick out the highest scoring image, the image we think is best out of your series of five, simply not true, because we judge them in a randomised order, but sequentially.

[00:18:51] We get an image, we judge it, we move on to the next image, we move on to the next image. So you have no control over what order we see them in. We have no control over what order we see them in. And the idea that we're going to go to the last image of a set of five, and could you know I've seen all of these?

[00:19:05] I think image one was the strongest, I should have given that more, more higher score. That's not how this works. We evaluate each image based on its own merits at that point in time. But if we then see four more of the same image, trust me, the impact on the last image isn't going to be as great, even though they are technically different images.

[00:19:26] So what you're doing is you're sacrificing four incredible images to get one through. You have to make a decision over which one to put in. And then, guess what? February? Put another one in. March? Another one. There's no way, it's not a, it's not a thing where we can pick images out, because we have to judge them one after the other, so that every single image stands the same chance of getting the same score. That's why we do it.

[00:19:51] And number nine, so another point on the judging, is don't forget to finish your images, each and every one of them, fully. So there's an image during the recent judging I did, stunning. I looked at it on the screen, small, beautiful. Hit the 100 percent button, zoomed into the pixels, moved around the image, because when you're doing online judging, this is how it works, and you could see that the photographer, it looked like, I don't know, their nan had called round midway through them doing the retouch.

[00:20:23] And they just never went back to that image. They submitted it with holes in the background and gaps where They'd dropped a background in over the top of the subject, and you could see the overlaps so clearly. They were just hard, like they'd hit it with the pencil tool, not the brush tool. And it clearly, all they'd done is not gone back over the image with a fine tooth comb.

[00:20:43] It really, it felt like, they're sitting there doing this beautiful retouch. It's a beautiful lady, she's got flowing hair, the background's nailed. She's resting on a bench, or whatever it was. And then bing bong. Mom's here. Mom. It's your mom, Paul. It's your mom. Come down. Alright, I'll be down. I'll be down in a minute.

[00:21:00] No, now. All right, I'll come down now. And that was the end of it. It's as if I went back to the image and just never picked it up again. I must have hit send or something. This is not my image, by the way. I really felt for the creator of it, because it was a stunning image. And I even put, it's one of the rare times I've put in the comments field when I'm judging.

[00:21:18] If the judge is surprised at why I've classed this as not competition standard, when clearly it's stunning. Clearly the photographer knows their craft. Please get them to look at it like I did and see the holes they've left in the retouch. So finish them properly.

[00:21:37] So don't do that. So those are the things I've noticed this time round.

[00:21:42] And the great thing about entering a competition is it gives you an opportunity to experiment. Experiment in January. If it doesn't work, change the experiment. Or, no, you never change the experiment.

[00:21:51] You experiment. That's not how it works. Experiment in January. Change what you try. in February. It's the same experiment. And then March. And then, who knows, by June, you might have got the swing of it. Who knows? What I will say, though, is that this ability every month to have a go, see how you do, celebrate your successes, learn from those that aren't quite so successful, is hugely, hugely powerful.

[00:22:16] I still, still don't think competitions are mentoring. They are different beasts. You know my views on that. But there is still something to be learned from. Entering a competition monthly.

[00:22:30] And the best way of entering monthlies, or any competition really, is if you are organized.

[00:22:35] Then spend time with your images. Print them, hang them up, look at them over time, keep an eye on them. Because if you do that You'll get to see those little niggles, you'll get to appreciate where things could be fine tuned.

[00:22:49] On the other hand, if you're like me, and it's all a little bit last second, then just make sure when you do the prep for your client, you're always producing images at sort of competition level.

[00:23:01] There is a difference between competition imagery, what we would choose, how we'd finish them, and there is with what we produce for our clients. But for me, that gap isn't that great. I think if you're a fashion photographer, there's almost no gap. If you're, one of the Fearless Wedding Photographers, there's almost no gap.

[00:23:19] I think there is for many sectors in the industry though. So just make sure you're prepping your images essentially to competition standard. If that image that I talked about earlier had gone out to a client, the client would have sent it back to me laughing. I'd have had to sort it out. And it did happen to me once.

[00:23:33] It wasn't my retouch, but I did see it. It was my image someone on at the time, an assistant had retouched it, and I knew the minute I saw it go out, it's like, that's coming back to me. And I knew because she'd over whitened the floor, and it looked like the object was floating. I don't do that kind of photography very much, but when I do, it has to be right, and it wasn't right, and it's really frustrating.

[00:23:57] Do it to the best that you can. Get it to competition standard, or as close as you can, with only just a little additional finishing where required, because that way, I don't need to worry about having tons of time to get it into a competition. The image I entered and got my gold bar was not the one I thought would do well.

[00:24:13] I just didn't think necessarily of the set that I entered, it was the strongest image. Turned out the judges felt differently. But it was certainly finished to that level because the band could have been using it on a poster.

[00:24:23] So, the same criteria is still applied.

[00:24:26] There's no jeopardy in entering. The worst that can happen is that you don't do as well as you'd hope. And that happens to all of us. The gold bar this month? It's the first one I've attained with the guild, and it's just a regular image. It's now out, of course, on social media.

[00:24:43] Sarah's celebrating it everywhere. I'm a little slower to get it onto social media. But it gives me an interesting topic to talk about on here. And so the question I suppose you're asking is, how many other images did I enter? I don't know how the other images did, I've only won one gold bar and got it one image of the month. But I can't argue that you can do this anonymously and then, for me, not be anonymous. So I'm not going to tell you how many other images I entered, but it's definitely more than one. And so why not make this, this year, the year you'll give it a shot. If you're part of the BIPP, you've only missed one month, you still have plenty of months ahead of you, there's nine more to go, deadline always at the end of the month, images, image results come out on the 15th, to give you time to reassess and figure out what you're going to enter for the next month.

[00:25:31] And you never know what might happen. And if you can do it for free, and this is particularly to the BIPP, if you can do it for free, Then we really, and I mean this, this isn't a figurative thing, you have nothing to lose. It's free. The clue is in the title. And on that happy note, I'm going to dose up on some Lemsip, some Benelin, some Nurofen, and I'm going to call it a night.

[00:25:56] Thank you for listening as I sit here in my cosy little lounge to this podcast. As always, head over to masteringportraitphotography.com for lots of articles and stuff, and also it's the spiritual home of this podcast. On top of that Please do leave us a review, tell another photographer or someone you might think would be interested in it about the podcast, leave us some comments wherever you can, and hit subscribe on whatever podcast player you use.

[00:26:21] That way, as soon as I get round to releasing an episode, there it is right in your ears before you even know it. Whatever else, as I sip my Lemsip, keep warm and be kind to yourself. Take care.

Suddenly it washed over me - that odd euphoric sensation of contentment.  No idea what triggers it, but it's well worth holding onto! 

Also in this episode, a quick review of ACDSee 10 (the Mac version).  If you'd like to try it yourself, please use this link (there is no kickback or finance attached, but it does let the guys at ACDSee know that the referral has come from me and the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast!)

Enjoy!

Cheers
P.

---

If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

---

Full Transcript:

EP146 On Being Content

[00:00:00] Introduction and Studio Update

[00:00:00] So in an effort to keep up my weekly episodes , I am recording this mid afternoon on a Tuesday, which normally would be fairly busy here in the studio, but given I've got two people who are off sick, with both Michelle and Sarah coughing and spluttering and generally not feeling very well.

[00:00:16] So with a degree of persuasion, managed to get both of them to go home. I'm assuming they are now wrapped up in duvets drinking brandy or whiskey or possibly just Lemsip. And so I suddenly found myself with some time in the studio during normal working hours. So this is episode 146 being recorded when, well, I could be doing a million other things.

[00:00:41] I'm Paul and this is a very distracted Mastering Portrait Photography podcast.

[00:01:03] Now if you look at the list of things I should be doing, it's long, it's complicated, there's a lot to do in the studio just now, but I quite like recording the podcast, and so I am somewhat using it as a distraction. Displacement, I think is what it's called, and I'm going to record this episode.

[00:01:22] Mastering Dogs and Their Owners Portraiture Photography Workshop

[00:01:22] It's not that long since the last episode, so it's not like I've done a million different things, but yesterday we ran a Mastering Dogs and Their Owners Portraiture Photography, I can't remember the title, ah, uh, workshop, which essentially is a Photographing dogs with their owners.

[00:01:37] Had the most incredible bunch of people as delegates and also as models. One of the great things about running these workshops, of course, is that we can bring in models who are regular clients. Steve and Ambra and their dog Luna, and then Gemma who came in the afternoon with her dogs Luke, and, archie.

[00:01:58] It was just brilliant. Spent the whole day laughing, the whole day answering questions and discussing things about photography, not just how to take these pictures, but why we take these pictures. And certainly from the point of view of running a business. The weather held, it was gorgeous and sunny, a little too sunny, with that low raking February sunshine that we don't get enough of, and when we do get it, of course, as a photographer, I moaned that it was too harsh, uh, for some of what we were doing, particularly when we were trying to photograph in an alley where I needed both walls to have the same light, more or less, and of course the sun sort of threw that out the window, but hey, you know, what can you do when you get those days?

[00:02:39] It was a fantastic day, and loved every second of it, I've created some images that I really like, and more importantly, I think our delegates went away with ideas and enthusiasm and determination and confidence, possibly more than they did when they arrived, which is the right way around, and if you ever give when we're delivering workshops, the great thing is not It's not about technical stuff really, it's about having the confidence to go and do it, because without that, it doesn't matter how good you are with a camera, or how good you are with Photoshop, you're not going to run any kind of business.

[00:03:14] You'll never produce anything. You need the confidence to do it in the first place. So a big shout out to all the guys that came on the workshop yesterday, and a huge thank you to my clients.

[00:03:22] ACDSee Software Review

[00:03:22] Uh, before I get into the nuts and bolts of the podcast I want to give a quick shout out to the guys at ACDSee.

[00:03:30] That's letter A, letter C, letter D, and the word 'See' S E E. A brilliant bit of software. It's a bit of software that I first used, I was trying to remember when they asked me to get involved. I was trying to remember when I last used it. I think I used version 1. I think it came free on the front of a magazine.

[00:03:49] It was I think, recalling it was shareware back then. Shareware is not really such a common model, but back then, I'm guessing 15 or 16, maybe even longer years ago. Um, and it was an amazing piece of software primarily because it was super fast and It has the ability to preview files and organize files for you in an incredibly quick way.

[00:04:13] And anyway, the guys at ACDSee asked me if I'd review it and then talk about it. So, cards on the table here. I have been given a free copy of ACDSee to see what I think. I'm on version 10, it's the MacStudio version. And so I've been bunged a free license, which I've been using for the past couple of months.

[00:04:34] So it's not really, this isn't a paid commercial. Genuinely, I'm using the software and I said I would talk about it if I liked it. But I'd hate anyone to think that I wasn't being straight up and honest when I'm talking about it. And clearly I've been given a free license. But of course, here's the but in all of this stuff is I will never talk about anything on this podcast that I haven't had first hand experience of.

[00:04:58] Somebody did ask me, there is someone has asked me to review like an energy drink from the US to use it for a while and then talk about what I think. Sadly though you can't get it in the UK so I had to go back to them and say I can't do that until you've got a supply chain or an importer over here.

[00:05:15] And then of course I will try it and let you know what I think. So I won't talk about anything that I don't have first hand experience of there are many reasons for doing this podcast but being able to be authentic in the middle of it is the bit that under pins it. So what are my thoughts on this version of ACDSee?

[00:05:31] So this is version 10, the Mac version. Um, so okay, straight up, slightly mixed bag, but don't I don't take that as anything other than there's just one little bit that I'm not happy about. So when they approached me, so when ACDSee approached me, I was beyond excited to do it. Firstly, I got to play with a bit of software that I used an awful lot back in the day.

[00:05:57] And it was wonderful to be using the same software again. There's a degree of nostalgia, I suppose, about that. And it's always good to see a great piece of software, as it was, not only survive, but expand and become even more useful. The second reason I was excited about it, so I went and did a quick hunt around before I committed to giving it a go, is everything I read talked about the new AI keywording tools, and they looked incredible. It would help me enormously if using a bit of AI inside the software that I have on my computer, as opposed to going online and doing round tripping and all of those things, if I had some AI software that would help me identify with some very simple keywords. I'm not after that. Detailed keywords, but very simple keywords that would let me find, for instance, like a low key studio portrait, or a high key dog image, you know those, I'm talking really quite basic stuff.

[00:06:50] Now we manage our catalogue really well, but stuff slips through, and with keywording, you know what it's like, you get one folder, I've got to archive it, I've run out of disk space, I need to move some stuff today, do I keyword it now? No, I'll do it later, and of course by do it later, what I actually mean is, it doesn't get done.

[00:07:07] So, that was What I was looking forward to the the speed and the simplicity of this piece of software as it used to be, but also with some of the new AI stuff in particular, the keywording. And so I suppose the question is how did it do? Brilliantly, I think, is the word I'd use. It is still blazingly quick.

[00:07:27] It's an unbelievable piece of software from that point of view. It's faster than using the Finder on the Mac or Pathfinder I also use. It's incredibly fast. Now, let me just clarify how I've used it or how I'm using it right now. Lightroom is at the heart of our workflow. All of our live catalogues. All of our live RAW files, all of our live PSDs are in Adobe Lightroom .

[00:07:52] And what do I mean by live? Live just means the job is not yet archived. I looked earlier and there's about 75, 000 assets in Lightroom at any one point. That includes all of our live jobs but also our portfolio, our portfolio of heroes. Now, I've configured Lightroom in a very particular way so when I run an export of JPEGs that are going to go to the client, they're going to go into album designs anything that's flagged with five stars, the little bit of code in the background that I've written spits those out into a series of Dropbox folders that are organized in line with the jobs.

[00:08:27] So, let's say there's a Le Manoir wedding Tom and Amy get married at Le Manoir on a date. When I spit those files out, there'll be an equivalent Dropbox folder that contains anything that was ranked with five stars. So it allows me to have these heroes in Dropbox. And we've been doing that for about eight years.

[00:08:45] So you can imagine just how many images and folders we have in Dropbox running that little bit of the catalogue. But when I archive the folder away, when it's done, the job's finished, Tom and Amy have got their wedding album, then we remove all of the files off our live drives, remove the catalog components from Lightroom, and obviously new stuff has come in.

[00:09:07] Those heroes, though, still need to be active, and they stay active in Dropbox, a series of Dropbox folders that I have. And it's always a little bit of a pain trawling up and down them. Well, ACDSee solves that, because once I visited a folder with this software, All of the thumbnails stay in its catalogue.

[00:09:24] So it's as if I can browse things that go across folders. There's this thing called the Image Well, which is brilliant. I can find things by flags. I can find things by colour labels. It's absolutely phenomenal. So at the moment, I've got about a quarter of a million. There's about 250, 000 JPEGs in ACDSee.

[00:09:47] It's really, really fast. And one of the things I really have liked about it, which is useful for me, is, and this is the bit of the AI that is working, is the facial recognition. Now, no Lightroom has facial recognition, but of course, in the end I don't use Lightroom for longer than the job is live for any folder.

[00:10:05] Whereas this is folders that go back historically. And I'm not really that worried about identifying every face. What I am interested in is having the faces all looking at me in a series of thumbnails that I can scroll through and go, Do you know what, I remember that shoot or I remember that image.

[00:10:22] That's what I'm looking for. Then I can find the shoot and then I can expand that to all of the other images. And on top of that, slightly weirdly, Hehe. I found myself just smiling this morning as I was trawling through this big page of thumbnails of my clients. It's all my clients faces looking back at me and smiling.

[00:10:39] And it was really nice. It was a bit of a trip down memory lane, I think, for many of these. And I know that's not its intended purpose, but if you ever want a pick me up It's simply look in this folder on ACDSee of faces looking back at you, of all these clients, and of course the memories that go with it.

[00:10:57] And it is rapid, I mean it's unbelievably quick in the way it does it. And it's really useful to have that. Now on the indexing side, it's a little bit, you have to get your head around it a little bit. It indexes any folder you've visited. Browsed. However, there is also a behind the scenes index that you can get ticking over, which will run whenever you're not using your computer and ACDSee is open.

[00:11:20] So gradually over time, it picks up the files and it pops them pops all the thumbnails together and categorizes them for you. So it's really really useful. On top of that, a nice little touch that I've only really discovered this morning is that your license includes the use of a thing called SendPix.

[00:11:38] This won't be useful to everybody, but it's quite a nice little bit of software. So it's, if you can imagine I suppose a hybrid version of something like Zenfolio which is a catalogue system for images for your clients and WeTransfer which is a way of sending files to your clients. It's sort of in between the two.

[00:11:58] What it allows you to do is select a load of images, send them to someone but instead of sending them directly it creates a short lived online gallery. It's there for a couple of weeks, I think, looking at the dates it gave me. And that allows your client, or whoever you're sending them to, to log in, see the images, and download what they need.

[00:12:15] So in a sense, it's like WeTransfer, but with an interactive component. And it's equally, it's a little bit like Zenfolio, but with a gallery that only lasts for a couple of weeks. So you don't have to worry about taking them up and taking them down, and all that kind of thing. It's only there for the time you need it.

[00:12:30] And, surprisingly It's actually really useful, which I hadn't seen coming. It wasn't a bit of the software. I certainly didn't pick that up when I said yes to reviewing ACDSee, but it's incredibly useful. Now, sadly, the software doesn't integrate with Dropbox properly. There is no integration with Dropbox, which is a shame.

[00:12:47] It would have been really nice. It does have an integration with iCloud, but I don't use that, so I can't comment on that part of it. But it would have been quite nice. It's no big deal. Doesn't really change my usage of it. And all in all, there are just dozens of little functions that make finding and retrieving files that you have on your folders and drives really easy.

[00:13:09] It makes it fast, it makes it visually interesting. I haven't used the editing tools because for us, everything we do is edited in Lightroom on the RAW files and the PSDs. I suppose it could be useful if I do pick up a file, I just think, you know what? I wish that was slightly brighter, I wish that was slightly darker, or something like that.

[00:13:26] I know there are some quite sophisticated tools in there, but that's not the part of the puzzle I've been interested in. And I think the license for the Mac version is about 99, and it's absolutely worth it.

[00:13:38] Sadly, the AI keywording is in the Windows version but not the Mac, but still

[00:13:42] I think it's absolutely worth it. Anyway, now whether that fits into your workflow is entirely down to you.

[00:13:49] Only you can answer that question. Now bear with me, I'll come back in a minute.

[00:13:53] Reflections on Happiness and Contentment

[00:13:53] I've got a phone call to answer.

[00:13:55] So sorry about that, I had to answer the phone. It was the editor, it was Terry, the editor of Professional Photo Magazine, who we regularly write for calling about the next edition, which is very exciting, as always. I've no idea, I've no idea in the final edit where I'll leave that cut in, or whether I'll just gloss over it.

[00:14:15] Either way, as I was trundling in this morning, I don't know whether this happens to you, but it happens to me occasionally, where It's just this, it's almost a feeling of euphoria, and it's happened to me a couple of times today, whether it's just chemistry, whether it's just, I don't know, I've no idea. But today, I felt like everything was good in the world.

[00:14:37] And, it's a real sort of skill, I suppose, in being completely comfortable with where you are. We had a text this morning. Someone was asking, how are things out in the industry? And I can only answer from our experience. And right now, we're doing well . Everything is busy phone's ringing, even this morning.

[00:14:56] We had an enquiry for a wedding just come through. We've got enquiries for headshots and commercial. Portraiture feels maybe a little bit squidgier than it has been on the economy. But all in all, our business is running really well and I'm really happy.

[00:15:07] I'm very satisfied with my lot. Now, I don't mean to be self satisfied, that's not what I'm saying, but I think the art of being content with your lot is a tricky one. Now don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly ambitious and driven and impatient. I want everything to happen and I want it all to happen now, but the reality of course is things are slower.

[00:15:27] So I get frustrated with it, of course I do. But trying to find the space in my head to be content is a skill that I am still learning, I guess. It's really easy not to be happy. Even this morning, Sarah had the radio on, and the news came on, and I could feel myself just getting wound up. The state of our economy, we have a particularly crappy government at the moment, and I'd like to say that's specific to the UK.

[00:15:57] I've got friends all over the world, and I keep, as best I can, I keep abreast of world news, and I think it might just be a global phenomenon. The kinds of people who you'd really want to lead you are not the kinds of people who we have leading us, I don't think. So it's easy to feel down, the weather's pretty rubbish, it's that time of year, you know, it's grey.

[00:16:18] Yesterday we had this phenomenal day of beautiful weather, but today, well, it's back to normal, it's chucking it down. But yet, even though it was cold and dark, I still found myself skipping into work this morning. Life is okay. And being happy with yourself is not that straightforward, I don't think. Jake, our son, was asking me if I liked myself and I thought that's an interesting question and I don't really have a satisfactory answer.

[00:16:45] Some days I like bits of me, some days I feel dreadfully insecure, but I'm always confident that on balance I'm alright. I feel alright, I'm on the whole nice to people, I try really hard not to be nasty to anybody. There are people I like more than others, of course there are. You know, you marry the one you like the most, right?

[00:17:09] And she's incredible. So being happy with your lot. I think is something you can do and it just washed over me this morning, maybe it's the fact that we ran the workshop yesterday and I was around people who I liked

[00:17:23] And even writing up the notes on ACDSee, it still feels really strange saying ACDSee, when I grew up in the 70s and the 80s, when ACDC was a band for those about to rock and all of that stuff. So it sounds really weird when I say it, but writing my notes on ACDSee I had to look through thousands of images that had dropped into our Heroes folders, which reminded me of the things we do.

[00:17:46] And on top of that, of course, I put the facial recognition on, and that reminded me of all of the incredible people we do it for. And if it wasn't enough that I came in skipping down the road as an image, right? What we do for a living, the things we create, and the people we create these things for, what an honour.

[00:18:05] not only ACDSee, but Sarah spent the past couple of days designing the most incredible book. A Tramontino book is the range from Graphistudio. And it's full of the same pictures, these pictures that we took in the past 12 months. It's a collection of some of our Favourite moments, I guess, out of 2023. A mix of clients and some dogs, all sorts of bits and pieces.

[00:18:31] One or two award winning images. But mostly, it's just a celebration of the people we work with. And I can't wait for that to come, for Sarah to get it made, uh, and Graphistudio to get it, to get it made.

[00:18:47] The Joy of Photography

[00:18:47] It'll be beautiful, I know that. But more importantly, it will sit on our coffee table, and every time I feel flat, or I feel like, Oh, do you know what? I'm not sure how I feel about all of this. I can go down and have a look at it, just as I do with one or two other bits down there.

[00:19:00] And it reminds me, just What a lovely job this is, and I can't wait to have that actually on our coffee table, not just as an advert for the product, and of course it is a great advert for the product, a Graphistudio product I may have mentioned we're ambassadors for Graphistudio, so there's my cards on the table again, but in the end, I am really lucky, and we are really lucky, to have a skill that allows me to create the pictures that we do, for the people that we do, the moments that we get to enjoy, the places that we get to visit, and the joy, that we get.

[00:19:36] It's easy to get distracted by life, but sometimes it's worth focusing on what it is I do. And for whatever reason that happened subconsciously this morning, but I probably should make it happen more of a deliberate thing as I go.

[00:19:52] Still ambitious, still competitive, still driven, still want it all to happen today. But maybe it just takes a little bit of time. .

[00:19:59] Conclusion and Workshop Information

[00:19:59] And on that happy note, I'm going to wrap up. If you're curious about our workshops, please do head over to Paul Wilkinson Photography and look for the coaching and workshops section. Eventually we're going to move all of those across into Mastering Portrait Photography, but for now they're all still on my normal website.

[00:20:19] I'll put a link if you're curious about ACDSee and want to download a copy to have a play. I recommend you do actually, I've really I've grown to love it. I have two screens on my Mac, two huge 27 inch monitors, and ACDSee sits permanently on my right hand monitor whenever I'm doing any design work or doing anything for the websites.

[00:20:39] It's there because I have easy and straightforward access to all of our hero images, all of my favourite images. It's incredible as a tool like that. It slots in alongside Lightroom for me. At least it won't replace it, though I'm sure the guys at ACDSee would love it too. That's not, for me, the function that it serves, but does that make it still worthwhile?

[00:21:00] I think it does, and I, for one, will renew my license when the time comes up. So I shall put a link down in the show notes for you to head across. It does have my name in it. I don't get a kickback from it. I think it just allows the guys at ACDSee to see that it came through me. And I'll also put it on our Facebook group for all of the people that have been on our workshop community.

[00:21:19] But All in all, I highly recommend it.

[00:21:23] In the meantime, I hope the weather is a little nicer where you are. I hope it's more like yesterday than today. But whatever else, keep skipping, keep smiling, remember that what we do is an incredible job. I'm Paul, and whatever else, be kind to yourself.

[00:21:38] Take care.

I am recording this having just spent the day running one of our workshops with some of the nicest people imaginable.  A top day (though I am now shattered!) at the end of a top month (January has been amazing) and who knows?  Maybe it's the start of a top year.  Don't want to tempt fate though...

This episode was triggered by a shoot I did last week, when just a few words seemed to change the course of a shoot.

Enjoy!

Cheers
P.

---

If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

---

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Can you believe it? January has nearly gone. We are almost into February, the second month of only 12 in a year, and this has already been one of the best starts we've ever had to any year. I'm Paul, and this is a very optimistic Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast. Well, I'll be honest, I did not see that coming.

[00:00:39] I think when we got to the end of last year, exhaustion took over, I crashed into Christmas, came out of it the other side, went into the convention, we're having a ball, but I think I don't know why I wasn't expecting this year to be quite as lively as it has been, but it does seem to be that there is a ton of energy out there.

[00:00:59] Maybe, maybe I was expecting the general election to be early in the year, and so things tend to get a little bit quieter around elections or around referenda. But the phone is ringing like crazy, emails are coming in. This week we've had a handful of reveals and they've all been brilliant. The clients have loved the images, everything's gone well.

[00:01:23] My bit of the puzzle is to create images, create an experience, send them away with memories and make sure they know what to expect when they come back for the sales, for the reveals. And they've gone really smoothly, which means I've done my bit properly, which makes me very happy because as you all know, a little bit chaotic at the best of times, uh, but it looks like my debriefs are working.

[00:01:43] I'm getting the point across to the client. We're creating pictures that people love and I am having a ball. I did think I might feel a little flat after the success of the Society's convention. It was such a good week. I know I spoke about it in the last podcast, but I'm still smiling at just how much fun we had, just how many people I met.

[00:02:06] The workshops were full. I spend a lot of time chatting photography, having interesting conversations, meeting interesting and funny people, and I think, I suppose, last week, I thought I might feel a little flat about it all, but that could not be further from the truth. If anything, I'm more energetic now than I have been for a long time, ignoring the fact that I'm also pretty exhausted and my eyes. I don't know why, but my eyes have been tired today. You know, you get those days when I put my glasses on and within three minutes, I've got to take them off, even though everything is just slightly blurry because I don't know why, it just makes my, it's just been making my eyes tired today.

[00:02:46] Maybe I just need to go and get them sorted, but this has been the most successful January we've ever had. And sometimes everything goes like that. It's just hectic, it's full of stuff, all unexpected, but being busy is a good thing. I think? Isn't it? Uh, I don't know. Anyway, today we've just finished the first of this year's workshops.

[00:03:11] This particular workshop was our From Shutter to Print workshop, uh, which steps through everything from picking up your camera all the way through to prepping your images ready for print. It's a huge, if you think about it, that's a huge field to cover. And of course, we try really hard to To tune it, we ask all of the delegates coming, we ask questions on what they're looking for.

[00:03:35] So we try to make sure that everything we're delivering is in line with what would be useful for them. And at this point of the day, it's quarter to eight in the evening. I don't know, a couple of hours ago when they left But they all look just slightly shattered, whether that's just because I've thrown so much information at them, whether it's just because it's a Monday, a dark Monday in January, or a combination of the two, I've no idea.

[00:03:59] Of course, I'm always slightly nervous of whether I've done a good job of delivering the information that would be useful for them, but it certainly has been a blast. And it was Loretta today. I don't know if I've ever talked about Loretta. Loretta was one of my clients. I photographed her wedding. Oh, it must be 10 years ago now.

[00:04:17] Um, and we've been friends ever since. She is a ball of energy and I absolutely love it when she's in the studio because there is not a dull moment. There's never a flat. Easy, calm couple of minutes. It's just 100 miles an hour from when she arrives to when she goes. So today has been one of those days.

[00:04:39] So thank you to everybody who came on the workshop. And obviously, thank you to Loretta for modeling. And once again, best lunch. ever. The guys, there's a delicatessen in our local town of Thame called What's Cooking. I don't know if a shout out to a small company in Thame is any good to them on a podcast that has photographers all over the world, but I'm going to give them a big shout because every time they do the food for us, it is a highlight of the day.

[00:05:06] I like to think the pictures I've created might be the highlight of the day. But no, no, I'm absolutely convinced that as everybody's driving away, they'll have been thinking that was a great lunch. We had beautiful food full of flavor, not your sandwich, not your average sandwiches that you get in packets or bowls of crisps.

[00:05:26] No, no, no. These are. Big plates of really beautiful vegetables and salads and a quiche and chicken and scotch eggs. It was absolutely incredible. So thank you to What's Cooking in Tame for yet again. They're our regular, they cater to our workshops all the time. I, when I set out with this thing. I wanted to deliver something that's genuinely useful, but also something that people will enjoy coming to.

[00:05:52] And lunch, for me at least, is a big part of that. I'm always disappointed when I go somewhere and it's a crappy lunch. You know, the edges of the sandwiches are curled. It's like tea in Tearns. Those annoyingly sweet biscuits that you get. None of that. Mid afternoon, so the first part of the day, the first half of the day is all photography.

[00:06:13] And the second half of the day is all Uh, techniques and things in Photoshop and Lightroom. And midway through that, Sarah arrives with Millionaire's Shortbread and tea and coffee and just lovely. And it just picks everybody up long enough for them to survive, survive me rabbiting on about Photoshop and Lightroom and retouching and layers and masks and curves and color profiles and LUTs and all of the things that are part of this thing.

[00:06:43] The mid afternoon snack is my highlight. I actually look forward to it. So I had this brilliant lunch. We've had beautiful people around, created amazing pictures, had a lot of fun. And mid afternoon, in comes a millionaire's shortbread. Oh my days. Yes, please. Thank you very much. Uh, anyway, what did I actually learn today?

[00:07:00] One of the things that came up in the editing section , someone asked me, Um, why I choose the order that I do for making my edits. And I've never really thought about why in anything other than, well I, you know, the background I'll do, I'll do this, then I'll do that, then I'll get all the way up to the front layers, then I'll do the retouching on skin, etc, etc, and any, you know, liquefying things.

[00:07:24] And actually when I thought about it, I stopped dead and I thought about it. I edit in the order of certainty that I won't need to go back to it. Now, I've never really thought about it logically like that till today. Maybe I should have. I've done it instinctively.

[00:07:42] So there's a thing called a desire line, or desire lines, and these are those paths that when you look at like a park, uh, like a park, particularly in a town, like a big expanse of green, or maybe in our village here we have, um, walk into the station, you go along the path, and the path dips into each of the cul de sacs.

[00:08:04] So the designers, the architects, or the town planners expect you to walk round the corner by about 20 feet, cross the road, Inside the cul de sac, and then come back out on the path, and on the corners of each of those cul de sacs, there's green, there's grass. But if you actually look, the grass is worn down because people have gone sod that and walking in a straight line.

[00:08:22] Similarly in a park, you'll see where the planners and the architects and the designers wanted you to go, and then you'll see where people actually go, and it's never the same place. Well, there's a name for it, they're called desire lines. And the same is true in how you develop processes in your business.

[00:08:39] I've talked about this before, and the trick really is to do the same thing over and over and over and find your own desire line. So much as you sit and plan things, much as you sit and analyse and decide to do this after that and that before this, in the end, you'll do what comes naturally. You'll go and basically The straightest line you can, the path of least resistance.

[00:09:00] It's called a desire line, it has a proper name. So when I was thinking about it today, because one of the delegates asked, why do I do it in this order? And, what I actually do, is I start with the background. So I've got my background layer that's come in from the raw file. I'll duplicate that, because then I've always got an original, uh, layer to go back to.

[00:09:19] Then I usually clean up, so if it's a studio shot, I'll clean up the background. I'll sort out anything to do with the background, because that isn't going to change. It, there's no real decisions to make there. I'm just going to do it, because Once it's done, it's done. I'll never need to go back to it. Then, I might work on, uh, all of the elements of the image that, although they might be quite intensive Photoshopping, they definitely need to be done.

[00:09:45] So, for instance, if someone's wearing a black outfit, as they were today, And there's lots of little hairs and flecks of dust and things. They're gonna need to be cleaned off. There's no ifs, no buts, no wherefores, no decisions to be made. I'm just going to clean it. I'll never need to go back to it because once it's clean, it's clean.

[00:10:03] And I can move on to the next stages. Then I've got a couple of decisions to make. Um, probably what I'm gonna do is do my skin work. So if it's a face, I'm a portrait photographer, there's nearly always a face. I'll do some skin work. I might Photoshop around the edges of the hair, any stray hairs. And I might do things like, um, frequency separation and some retouching with some dodging and burning.

[00:10:27] Then once I've got clear of that, probably what I might think about doing is maybe putting in a texture on top of a background layer. But things like that I might change my mind about, so they're right at the top of the stack. Um, then when I've got there If I need to do any liquefying or any puppet warping, this is the moment.

[00:10:44] It's really late in the stages of photography. Why? Because I'm not certain at this stage, or I'm not 100 percent ever at this stage, quite what would be the right amount of that kind of work. Of all the things we do, I think it's probably the most contentious. Changing someone's body shape because I've posed them badly.

[00:11:07] It's still an area where it's a little bit vague as to how much is the right amount to do, particularly as someone who photographs all sorts of walks of life, all sorts of ages. I don't want to be in that realm of, you know, everybody has to look a certain way. But equally, if I've posed someone not as optimally as I should have, maybe I'll just fix that.

[00:11:27] But it's going to happen really late in the edit. If later on, I'm really close to finishing an image at this point, so if I decide, well, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't have done that, I can go back and I don't have to undo any of the rest of it. And then the final tiny little bit, probably to put a vignette on top, uh, if I, if I want to, and then maybe finish off with a black and white conversion, or something like Nik Color FX.

[00:11:52] So basically what I'm doing is I'm working all the way up from the bottom with all of the things that really, really, really, uh, are definitely going to be done no matter what, all the way to the things actually if I change my mind tomorrow, I won't have to start again at the bottom of the layer stack.

[00:12:07] And I've never really thought about it like that. Um, so many of the processes in our studio are my own desire lines, but I've never thought about that one. So it's kind of cool that at the end of a workshop I've learned something really good as well. So thank you to everyone who came. Really excited about this year's workshops.

[00:12:24] All of them. They're going to be brilliant. Particularly if they go like today. But the one, if I'm honest, that I am most looking forward to is the one we're running on the 18th. So, uh, I've got about six, what's that, six, eight weeks, uh, to think about it. Uh, it's called at the moment, Ordinary to Extraordinary Studio Photography, probably because we were hunting around for a title for it.

[00:12:46] Sounds alarmingly like some of Gerry Guionis titles. Uh, but it could also have been called, I don't know, the Storeroom Studio or Lighting Up in the Lounge. No, no, not lighting up. That makes it sounds like you're smoking lighting in the lounge or maybe the basement backdrop. I don't know, but whatever it is titled, it's all about creating magic in small, awkward, tricky spaces, which is something I've had to do a lot of when I'm working in office buildings.

[00:13:17] When I'm working in other people's homes, you never quite know what you're going to get. And this whole workshop is dedicated to things like basements. Boardrooms, cellars, lounges, hallways, corridors, even store cupboards. I kid you not, I did a shoot the other week in a store cupboard. A big store cupboard, but a store cupboard.

[00:13:40] So at the moment I am coming up with ways to mimic what it's like to work in these little spaces that are awkward, but still create gorgeous images. Now I'm really excited about it because one of the things about smaller spaces is you tend to get, assuming you can get your kit. In there, you tend to get lower contrast because the light pings around a little bit and you can get some really beautiful, gentle, effortless setups.

[00:14:06] Uh, so that is going to be an absolute blast. Cannot wait, uh, for that. Uh, how am I doing? What did I say I was doing last week? Oh yes, the MPP website. Still rebuilding it. It's a long process. We are getting there, slowly but surely, we are getting there and it is taking shape. The content is nearly over. But I've still got to reorganise it all.

[00:14:29] And in the process of doing it, we're reading everything. I'm reading every article, double checking to see if it's still relevant. One or two of the things we've ported over that came from the book, and then went to the Mastering Portrait Photography website. Well, of course, the book was published in 2014.

[00:14:43] It's 10 years old this year. And some of the information in there is now, frankly, outdated. Anything to do with cameras and lighting, things have moved on. Probably also the Photoshopping, although luckily, the small bits of Photoshopping I put in were basically about principles, not about specifics. So, you know, generative AI hadn't even been thought of at that stage, nor had things like the removal tool, nor had actually quite a lot of the tooling in Photoshop or Lightroom.

[00:15:12] It just, the latest versions are worlds apart from what was going on in 2014, but equally, an awful lot of what's on there is Totally relevant, totally pertinent, uh, to, uh, what's going on. So, um, we are working on it. We will get there, trust me. When it's done, we will sing it from the rooftops. Uh, but I'll keep you up to date with how that is all going, uh, including my excitement, uh, for it.

[00:15:39] Um, this week's Thought of the Week. And it's a simple one. Well, they're always simple ones. I mean, I'm not a complicated guy, not really. This week's Thought of the Week is that you genuinely You genuinely have the power to make people feel amazing with words, just as you do with pictures, if not more so.

[00:15:59] Why do I say that? Well, two different clients this week, one in particular, he came, he was just a lovely guy. Uh, he made the claim right at the beginning of the session that he hadn't really ever had a picture that he really liked of himself. And I'm looking at him thinking, I'm not quite sure why. I can't see it visually, but maybe it's the way he reacted to being in front of the camera.

[00:16:24] We've got shooting and all was going reasonably well, and then suddenly. Something about the way he looked and the way he moved reminded me of Vernon Kay. He's from a different area of the country, one's from the North, Vernon Kay's from Bolton, I think, and my client's from the South. Different heights, I think Vernon Kay's about 6 foot 8 or something, ridiculous, 6 foot 2, I've no idea.

[00:16:46] But he's tall and he was a model, my client, anything but. But, there were definitely similarities in the mannerisms, in the haircut, and if I got the light in a certain position and the angle was right, In the way he, it lit his face. And I've said this, and I'm laughing. And he didn't know who Vernon Kaye was, which is a little bit sobering.

[00:17:08] Obviously, people who are younger, uh, maybe Vernon Kaye's not on their radar just yet. But. As I talked it through, visibly, the guy grew in confidence. You could see his body language change, you could see him just come out of himself a little bit, and of course as he's doing that, I'm getting better pictures because his confidence has grown.

[00:17:30] It's paying dividends just having someone in front of me who feels better about themselves. Now don't get me wrong, you cannot tell someone they look like Robert Redford if they don't. That's not what I'm saying. But in finding really good positives Things about someone, not only that you like, but things that you can verbalize, whether it's something to do with a glint in their eye, whether it's something to do with their clothing.

[00:17:54] In this instance, it was someone he looks a little bit like. And with a shoot, particularly with headshots where it could be corporate, it could be an author, it could be a musician or an artist, I don't necessarily know who's coming in or how confident they are. or what we're going to do. Sometimes I do, but not that often.

[00:18:16] And so I will nearly always in my head figure out an actor or a public figure who has a media presence. Obviously not, hopefully someone who's nice, not a Donald Trump or a Liz Truss. Uh, to, to, and what I'll do is it's with that personality is I'll figure out what would their agent have asked of them for photos.

[00:18:40] What would be in their portfolio, their lookbook? What would be on the inside sleeve of an author's bio? If they were in a BBC or an ITV or a Netflix drama, what would the cover shot look like? Because the thing about actors, in particular, the thing about actors, is they reflect Every day Life.. So you get actors from all sorts of backgrounds and skill sets.

[00:19:06] You get every ethnicity, you get every gender, you get every identity, you get attitudes, you get heights, you get everything. Because actors have to represent the world in which we're all familiar. So you get as many different types of actor. As you do people on the planet. And if you can find an actor that is close enough, close enough to the person you have in front of you, and then work out in your head quickly, what might the film they're in be?

[00:19:37] What might a book they've published be? What would a cover look like? What would the poster image on Netflix or Amazon or Maybe in an agent book or maybe on a, on a music album cover. I don't know. I'm making this up as I go along, but if you can picture it, if you can find it, if you can drag it out of your imagination and your history, two things.

[00:20:01] Firstly, you can say to the client, Oh man, you remind me of X. And that's a very helpful thing to do because the client will grow in confidence, but secondly , so do you. Because you're now shooting with something in mind that you might not have had when the shoot started. You might have, but you might not have.

[00:20:21] For me, I love that moment when I open the door and suddenly I've got to figure out what shots are going to look good. How am I going to do this? What's I'm going to look at their clothing, get them to talk me through their clothing and step through all of the things we're going to do with that. I love that energy and that positivity as we drive the shoot forward.

[00:20:39] And I'm not kidding, not only did my client feel better, but so did I because I was now producing better pictures because my client was reacting to the camera in a way that could really only result in beautiful images.

[00:20:54] Please do, when you're working, think of ways of making your client feel a million bucks. And language is every bit as important as what you do with your lights and your camera with Photoshop. Now that's a proper time to know, a proper point to end. As always, if you're interested in our workshops, just Google Paul Wilkinson Photography Workshops, or head over to Paul Wilkinson Photography and look for the coaching section.

[00:21:20] Please do give us a like, a wave, a review. Uh, some five stars maybe that'd be really nice, uh, on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you wanna subscribe to the podcast, please do so on your, on your, uh, podcast Player of Choice so that every time I record one, it'll drop as if by magic, straight into the list of things to listen.

[00:21:41] Like I said last week, I'm gonna try and keep this as a weekly podcast, this time round. Shorter episodes, but far more. Of them. As always, if you have, uh, any questions at all, you can reach me onPaul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. We've had some really lovely emails this week from people. Thank you to everyone who's emailed in, uh, to say they're enjoying the podcast.

[00:22:03] Uh, so you can reach me atPaul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. And until next time, however your week is going, however, your January is ending, your February starting, or if you're just listening to the back catalog, whatever it is you're up to, whatever else. Be kind to yourself. Take care.

Well we're back from The Societies Convention in London and it's been a blast (though I am a little weary!)

However, no matter how tired I am, I am going to have to find the energy for my clients - just as we all need to.  And that is the topic of this episode.

Enjoy!

Cheers
P.

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If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode.

PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think!

If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. 

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Full Transcript:

 

[00:00:00] Just got back. From the Society's Convention in London. Four days of hugging, laughing, talking photography, talking crap as well, I think, drinking, eating, not sleeping, running workshops, meeting suppliers, having conversations with editors, more drinking. And generally feeling good about this industry of ours.

[00:00:20] I've met so many people, I've hugged so many people. And for people like us who work in small businesses, many of us on our own, the convention is by far the best possible start to the year. I'm Paul and this is a slightly bleary eyed Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast. 

[00:00:41] 

[00:00:55] Well, hello one and all. Um, coming back down after the annual convention is a little bit of a task.

[00:01:03] I needed to sleep quite a lot and to eat, well, something sensible if I'm honest, rather than a diet of beer and carbs. On the night of the awards themselves, I look over, it's about two o'clock in the morning, and I see Sarah sat in a corner, eating the world's largest packet of popcorn. And you do know what it's like when you get the munchies, there's nothing quite like sugary, salty goodness of popcorn.

[00:01:28] The hardest part of huge conventions for me is always that I struggle to place people, so it's slightly stressful, and it's not really made any easier by the fact that a lot of people only know me because they've heard my voice on the podcast. So lots of conversations start with me saying, hello mate, and then rapidly trying to remember why or how or where I know someone from.

[00:01:51] Sarah is in a different league, of course. She seems to have an encyclopedic ability to recall conversations and characters, whereas I'm oblivious trying to figure out the light on someone's face. The number of times I've met someone and all I can think is that the lighting is perfect and it would make a great portrait.

[00:02:08] Not very helpful when you're trying to hold a normal conversation . 

[00:02:11] So this year, I jumped back into the fray and entered the print competition. Haven't done that for a couple of years for one reason or another, mostly because I've been judging. But this year, as chair of judges for a different association, I've been relieved of my duties at the Societies convention, which frees me up to enter. 

[00:02:29] And of course it's a good idea whenever you do get the chance to enter a print competition because it forces you, I mean literally forces you to practice what you preach. However, as always Uh, the images that I hadn't expected to do well did brilliantly, while some I had high fa hopef bleh bleh, I'm breaking these teeth in for a donkey, while some I had high hopes for didn't do quite so well.

[00:02:54] Overall, though, a really good show for me. Out of the 12, I entered 9 achieved merits. Uh, 2 were finalists, so runners up, uh, which is one hell of a rate. The other thing I'm proud of is that they're all from commissioned shoots, bar one, just the one. There is in there an image of our dog Rufus, the studio dog Rufus, which I entered into the pets category because, well, he is a pet and he is really photogenic.

[00:03:23] But you can only ever get one shot of him, just the one. You put him in front of a nice light, you take your picture. He's out of there. Doesn't matter how many treats, how much you persuade him, you get just one shot. So I've had to learn to be right on my toes. Anyway, all respect to the judges, as in my opinion at least, there was no doubt that when it got to the final three images in each and every category, and that includes the ones I did and didn't do well in, I don't think you could argue that they didn't warrant the placing that they gave them.

[00:03:51] Though for me this year, uh, I was a little bit of the bridesmaid, not quite the bride next year. You know, next year. Because there's always that thing when you pick out your images that this time. This time, that's, that particular picture is going to do well. Think about it. You wouldn't enter if you didn't really believe that you were going to win.

[00:04:11] You wouldn't pay the fees, you wouldn't spend the time prepping, you wouldn't spend the time printing, if you really and truly didn't believe that particular image stood a chance. But, as ever, it's a little bit of a lottery, if I'm honest. I think I did alright. Uh, on guessing, but there's a one image in particular that I thought would do much better than it did.

[00:04:32] And it really didn't score very well. It didn't quite put me on the wooden spoon. Yep, there is a wooden spoon floating around, uh, which has been going for years. My name is on it from one year, but thankfully not this year. And that's for the entrant who scores the lowest out of all the people, um, who are involved, uh, with that particular competition.

[00:04:52] But at least you get to take one prize home. I am quite lucky, as I do know pretty much every judge personally, many of them I've judged alongside for a lot of years, so a few of them were kind enough to tell me what had been discussed and what I might do to improve. Even after all these years, you do have to keep developing it, it would be, well apart from anything else, it would be very boring if you didn't.

[00:05:16] And every other photographer at the convention will be doing exactly the same thing, except maybe the overall winners, who I'm guessing are enjoying a little champagne and admiring their own work, at least for the next day or three. Anyway, it turns out one errant shiny button and one pair of shoes that I could have placed more prominently and I might just have made it to be the bride not the bridesmaid.

[00:05:40] This year's target, the one coming up, that is 2024, is to get my shit together on the post production side. All my life I've constructed images in camera and not really needed to focus too much on Photoshop, though I do love the power of it and I really love The whole process of putting an image together, but I really do think it's time for me to up my game with Adobe's finest.

[00:06:05] Uh, there were also a ton of meetings, some formally arranged with others being far more impromptu and involving a pint. It was so good to see the people who make many of our bespoke products. So we saw Graphistudio, we saw Kaleidoscope, these guys supply the stuff that we supply our clients. It was wonderful to catch up with them, as well as the editors of various magazines that I write for.

[00:06:27] Though that does now mean there's a load of work for me to do and the corresponding deadlines to contend with. And if that weren't enough, and there was certainly plenty going on, there is of course an entire program of workshops. And this year, Sarah and I were having a ball running two. A superclass on headshots and a masterclass on simple but effective lighting.

[00:06:50] Both of the workshops, thankfully, were chock full. The second, the masterclass, was standing room only. So a huge, huge, huge thank you. Know who you are to everyone who came and laughed our way through many hours of creating images. One of the best things about the convention is it really is all about energy Which brings me, neatly, or maybe not so neatly, depending on your view, to the thing that occurred to me this week.

[00:07:17] And it's a very simple thing. It's that you walk energy. into the room. 

[00:07:24] Simple thing, huh? 

[00:07:26] It doesn't matter whether you're running a workshop or you're with your client, the energy of the room is almost entirely down to what you bring in with you. And if you don't have it, you can bet your delegates, your audience, or your subjects won't have it either.

[00:07:41] I am not saying, I'm not saying you need to be loud. I know I am quite loud or out there, uh, but you need to have an energy about you, a positivity. You need to be on 10. For me, it's reasonably easy. The fact that I have someone in front of me just seems to trigger something in me. It brings out the performer and it's important that it's a performance and not an act.

[00:08:04] Authenticity is crucial. The lie of acting will very quickly be found out. A performance, on the other hand, is exactly what it is. You and you at the fullest of your ability being truly present, truly engaged in the moment and the people around you. Sometimes, if I'm honest, I really don't feel up to a shoot or I'm not massively full of energy and I have to take a breath and remember that it's me that drives the shoot.

[00:08:32] It's me that provides the pulse.

[00:08:35] It's me that defines it. 

[00:08:37] I have to find whatever it is in me that will define how the shoot or the workshop is going to go. I have to be on a 10. Always. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, there's a thing called the Laughter Club. It was first popularised by an Indian physician called Madan Kataria.

[00:08:57] I think I've pronounced his name correctly, apologies if I haven't. And this is where groups get together and deliberately laugh. But the effect on the brain, even though they're doing it deliberately, and not necessarily for any good reason, has exactly, is exactly the same as if you went to a comedy club.

[00:09:16] The effect on the brain, it doesn't care that the laughter isn't because you're out being entertained. It doesn't care, it doesn't know that the laughter might not be real. It has the same effect on your brain. The trick to this, and this is to take a quote from Wikipedia, is that the brain does not know we're faking it.

[00:09:38] It's as if you were genuinely laughing. It's as if you were genuinely happy. Well the same is true when you put yourself on a 10 The same is true if you talk yourself into being energetic, if you talk yourself to being present, you will feel energetic, you will feel present, just as laughter in a laughter club makes you feel like you're having a funny moment.

[00:10:02] The same endorphins, the same processes. So it's not just that you will give out, but that you will end up feeling the same way. Not only will your clients feel it, you will feel it. And this is also the same way I prep to record this podcast. It can't work if I'm not feeling it, so I have to feel it every time.

[00:10:22] As an aside today, I've been sitting here waiting for the moment to record it, uh, because there's been, uh, an Amazon delivery waiting and waiting. It's eight stops away, six stops away, and all the way up until it's nearly here, and then I realized I can hear the van. I can hear the driver. So I've just had to leg it down the road, uh, knock on his door and say, look, they're going to the wrong house. They should be at the studio and got my delivery. And of course that puts you in the wrong frame of mind to come back and do the podcast. But I still had to sit, get my head in it and figure out what I wanted to feel, what I wanted to convey. And why bother? I mean, why is it important?

[00:11:02] Well, if your clients are having a good time, they will to put it absolutely simply, spend more. Partly because if they've loved it and you've formed positive associations and memories with the shoot and partly because if you're working at a hundred percent, you'll be more creative. But if you bring the two together Well, that can only increase the odds of getting your best sales.

[00:11:25] Anyway, back to the here and now. As I'm busily rebuilding our Mastering Portrait Photography website, something that is slow going, but I am honestly really enjoying it. We will release it in the next few weeks. And I've always loved being a coder, though I was never, ever particularly talented at it. But it is quite nice to spend time absorbed in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, API documentation.

[00:11:48] Uh, you know, if you know, you know what I'm talking about. 

[00:11:51] Anywho, thank you for staying here until the end of this podcast. My target this year is to get back to doing them weekly, which is how I started out. This might not be entirely realistic given the diary that I have, but it is still my ambition.

[00:12:07] Shorter episodes, But more of them. And, well, we'll see. As always, if you have questions or feedback, please do drop me a line. I can always be reached at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk, that's paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk. Or leave us a 5 star rating on Apple's podcast app as it helps to drive SEO up massively and every little helps.

[00:12:28] If you're interested in any of our upcoming workshops, please head to paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk and then just search out the coaching section or more simply just Google Paul Wilkinson Photography Workshops. If you'd like to hear more episodes they can be found on all popular podcast players or head over to the spiritual home masteringportraitphotography.com where you can find the entire Back Catalog and a whole heap of other resources dedicated to the art, the craft and the business of portrait photography. And whatever else you do in the coming week, remember, be kind to yourself. Take care.

[00:13:07] ​