Phil Barber Photography

This week Rob Booker, Barnaby Aldrick & myself ran our first 3B Media ‘Inspiring Photography’ workshop, called ‘Urban Portraits’.  We’ve been planning it for quite some time now and it turned out to be such a fantastic day!

At the Round Foundry Media Centre near Leeds’ Granary Wharf we brought together 2 models, a make-up artist & 4 delegates and spent the day teaching them how we shoot portraits in the urban environment.

The delegates had fun shooting our pro-models, and it was so rewarding seeing them grow in confidence through the day.

In fact, some of the images they were getting were starting to make me feel we’d taught them too well!

Here’s one of our shots of Stef, who’s always such a joy to work with.

To start with I did a classroom session  running through exposure and how to shoot manually, Rob ran the mornings ‘finding backgrounds’ and ‘Communication & Etiquette’ practical shoot classes.

We taught delegates how to quickly find & use clean backgrounds, such as this one of Alex.

Here I am teaching the Natasha’s (there were two!) This was up a fire escape over looking the Saw Mill. This place was amazing for loads of different backgrounds and textures. I’m sporting my lovely little Shootsac.

Our long time 3B Media make-up artist also models, so after she’d made Alex & Stef up, she got involved herself!

What amazing brown eyes!

In the afternoon we walked over to new revitalised Granary Wharf to try out some  new backgrounds and I went through composition and finding light with the delegates.

Another shot of Alex trying to demonstrate you don’t have to shoot head on but consider different angles.

Barnaby did a lot of filming the day – a little video will follow soon. But also he spent a lot of the time during the practical classes on hand to help delegates once they got shooting.

This is one my favourite shots that Barnaby took and the one below is my favourite one that Rob took.

These next few shots I took of Alex under the arches behind Granary Wharf. I love these as a group of six. Here we were showing the benefit of using reflective light and using the lines of the lights to add a dimension to the shot

Here is Natasha working with Alex. It was great that by the nend of the afternoon session – the delegates had the confidence to take the models off on their on and start shooting in their own style.

Then back to the Round Foundry forBarnaby’s classroom module on how we bring images to life in post production & Adobe Lightroom.

Check out Barns  looking all teachery!

It was such a awesome day, with everyone getting a set of stunning photos and leaving inspired and in control of their DSLRs!

It was equally inspiring to us as 3B Media, and we’re going to run the same course again in May and start planning further workshops on (amongst other things) flash, wedding photography & post production!

After a quick group shot, we popped to the pub (3B goody bags in hand!) for a cheeky beverage or two…

I’ll be posting more on the workshop soon, once we’ve edited some video and rounded up some images shot by delegates! But keep your eyes on www.3bmedia.co.uk or on our facebook page below to become a fan / get news on upcoming workshops!