Every alternate year, Adobe organizes a Tech Summit in California. This is a good opportunity for everyone to get to know about the new trends, company's areas of focus, and also the work happening in different groups. Apart from all the technical and business sessions, it is a great opportunity to meet people from different geographies. After this 3-day Tech Summit, various team level events are organized. This year, my Adobe friends organized a Photo-Walk in Alviso Marina County Park. Last year we had a wonderful Photo-Walk around San Francisco. This Photo Journey shares some of the photographs from this year's Photo-Walk, which offered good amount of learning to all of us.
Although I have moved to a different group now, friends from my old team were kind enough to extend the Photo-Walk invitation to me as well. It was a full-day event, wherein the first half was spent in a studio to learn the importance of speedlights, reflectors, and other relevant lighting equipments used for portrait photography.
I couldn't join during the first half because of some prior commitments in office. Once my meetings at San Jose office were over, Thomas dropped me at Alviso Marina County Park where I joined other folks for the photo-walk.
Two professional photographers along with 2 super-energetic models were accompanying the team for the photo walk.
It was great to meet everyone again after 2 years. Some of us had great time during San Francisco Photo-walk in 2013.
Both the photographers selected 2 different locations and divided the whole group into sub-groups of 3. Each group got a chance to shoot both the models one by one. During these shooting sessions, the photographers kept explaining about the different technicalities involved in clicking portraits.
When the first batch of 6 was busy clicking the models, others were gearing up and trying various shots and having fun in general. :)
The Alviso Marina County Park offered a lot for us click-happy people.
Photographers were carrying different types of reflectors and explained about how each one is used. We talked about these and spent a lot of time practicing with these reflectors. At the same time, the photographers emphasized on the fact that following rules is good but breaking those and creating something interesting is better. So understand the fundamentals of light and exploit them in the best possible way.
Most of the times Photographers were suggesting different poses to models and gradually models kept trying various things and helped us taking better shots.
While most portrait photographs appear simple, a lot of technology, in fact, goes into creation of each such photograph.
Even with a slight shift in the pose and direction of the model, the photograph changes completely.
Imaginative use of props is another important skill of a good model and the photographer.
We changed locations, tried various perspectives, with & without reflector lights and lot more.
These wide-angel shots were taken without any external artificial light source.
Luc loved this sign and I also took a shot at it. :)
Throughout this Photo-Walk most of us were very much engaged with activities planned by our instructors and hardly clicked other things in this beautiful place. While we were shooting on a deck, Hema suggested that we shoot this view. The actual view was actually far more beautiful than it appears in this shot.
Both the rock-stars of this Photo-Walks. They were awesome !
After some time, we moved to shadows to click different things with reflectors. During this session, Photographers shared some facts about different types of natural lighting and how to make the most of them for portrait shots.
In this photograph Luc is holding the reflector and everyone is focusing on the correct mode to capture this shot in their cameras.
The above photograph is clicked in shadow and faces were lit with light through reflectors. There was no direct sun-light on the reflector but still some light is reflected because of the shiny surface of these reflectors. During this Photowalk, we tried the white, silver, and golden reflectors.
and more to come...
.jpg)