Click 4

I am just recovering from my week at Click 4, the 4th annual California Photo Festival, in the central coast area. I now find myself rapidly preparing for the big east coast photography convention, Photo Plus Expo and I thought I’d squeeze out a blog post before I leave.

The festival takes place in October, generally over the Columbus Day weekend—this year it happened during the week, from Oct. 7th thru Oct. 11th—5 days of fun packed workshops, seminars and photo safaris. I taught 12 workshops & seminars, exhausting but very fun. The festival is very well managed by the amazing (and this year, very pregnant) Victoria Schmitt, and there were few glitches save for the inevitable weather cancelations. I always have a lot of fun at the festival and I get to hang out with some amazing photographers and instructors!

Every year, one of the first workshops, or photo safaris is the “Horses on the Beach” group shoot. This is so popular that it has become almost a cliche and most attendees manage to get a great shot of horses and riders running along the waters edge at sunset. I am usually tasked with finding some alternative subject to shoot and this year we had a group of belly dancers that modeled for us…

Belly Dancers

The belly dance group had great colorful costumes and they were a lot of fun to photograph

As it turned out, this year it was overcast the evening of the shoot, so there was no sunset. However, this did not pose a problem for my group and we got a lot of cool movement shots of these colorful dancers.

B&W and Beyond

New False Color Technique

Glassware-2

Separate lighting directions were placed into the separate RGB channels to create this colorful effect with white light flashlights.

The last full day of workshops had me doing a seminar/demo on Hollywood style glamour photography. I was fortunate to have the amazing Amanda as my last minute model substitute! You can see how I achieve some of my glamour effects here: A Better Glamour Image

Amanda

Amanda Valena was my model for the Hollywood Glamour workshop where I shot, retouched, and applied several special enhancements in a 3-hour session.

My last workshop was a sunset walk on the beach with the amazing Amanda as my model again. As is usual for me with these sort of workshops, my students all got many more good shots than I did…

Amanda with Blue Umbrella

Here the sunset light is being bounced back into the shadow side with a silver reflector. The Pismo Beach pier is in the background.

Amanda on the Beach

On final sunset shot as the sun drops behind a cloud back on the horizon.

The California Photo Festival is always a blast, and I look forward to sharing it with you all next year. If you’ve never sampled the pleasures of California’s central coast, make it a point to join me next year at the Click 5 festival.