We were all set to do a seminar in Tulsa, Oklahoma next month and the Board of Education shut us down! Can you believe that? Oh well, what does someone like me do when there’s a bunch of bureaucratic red tape? We re-route, switch it up and decide to hold one in my own home town! And that’s what we’ve decided to do! The weekend of July 11 and July 12, we are holding a two day workshop/seminar specifically targeted to shooting fashion.
Recently I was asked by Brandon Oelling if he could profile me on his x= blog. I checked out his blog and was immediately 100% supportive of what he offers as far as expertise in this ever evolving and ever confusing world of digital workflow and technology. For myself, making the leap from film to digital in the late ’90′s wasn’t easy. I have to admit I went kicking and screaming. Imagine having twenty years of knowledge on how to expose and develop film and then print from negatives just for that knowledge to be pushed aside in order to learn and embrace the digital medium…..I was a little teed off, to say the least! But for photographers like myself, having someone like Brandon available to us is like striking gold! For more than 10 years Brandon Oelling has been at the helm of x=photography+consulting, working with photographers both new and old to demystify technology and break down the voodoo that surrounds technology and digital workflow. Leveraging his engineering background and fine arts training, Brandon has played a pivotal role in helping numerous clients and studios ramp up their operations to include an all-digital workflow and archiving process. Brandon’s expertise in best practices, planning, and execution strategy for digital workflow (RAW, Adobe DNG, JPEG, TIFF, etc.) and digital asset management (DAM) systems allows him to specifically target a solution for each and every client.
First of all, I want you to check out the interview I did for his blog! His blog is designed beautifully, and kudos to Brandon for the aesthetically gorgeous and yet user-friendliness of it:
Melissa Rodwell Interview on X= blog!
So who catches your attention? I’d like to know which fashion photographers my readers follow and why!
We all go through it. Times when we are more inspired to shoot than others. Sometimes we’re just bursting with new ideas and concepts we have to shoot! Other times it seems like nothing comes to us. We pour through magazines, we search through websites. Still, there’s this empty void and we experience something similar to “writer’s block”. I go through this too, sometimes. We all have lives to live and sometimes our personal lives have a little too much stress in them to think creatively. For some, that stress is actually a catalyst to create. Some people are more driven when shit goes down in their lives. I know in the past that some painful experiences have led to some hugely motivated and productive times in my career. But for the most part, stress isn’t what I search out when I’m trying to inspire myself.
I have received a lot of personal emails over the last couple of weeks from readers wanting to pick my brain on my use of photoshop. I think the most common question has been is if I decide before I even shoot how I will want the images to eventually look like and the steps I take to get from prepping a shoot to the final result. I can begin by reassuring everyone that I absolutely consider how the final images will look before I ever fire off a single frame. It is absolutely essential to have an idea of how you want your images to look so you can take that into consideration on how you will shoot. Will you need a lot of room around the subject to drop in walls or objects? Are you going in and doing major special effects on the model? Are you going to trick out the color and distort angles?
