Pixiq

For those not interested in general and speaking news, feel free to skip this. Last week I was away in Roaches Hall in the Peak District of England at the invite of Paul RG Haley. I know Paul from the SWPP and Twitter. The premise of this annual residential week is sharing and training, mainly geared to wedding, portrait, boudoir and some fine art nude photography. I was there to talk Lightroom, but also did a session on Off Camera Flash using the Canon ETTL system and manually using radio triggers (in this case Elinchrom Skyports). In the evenings I also did a lot of impromptu Photoshop sessions, which went down really well, with a lot of oohs and ahhs from those around. These evening times also gave people a chance to ask me direct questions about Lightroom, things that they wouldn’t ask in a group sessions, which I thought was valuable for them.

Photo by Steve Ramsden (Yorkshire Wedding Photographer)

Other things on during the week included Aladdin Gulec revealing quite a lot of SEO tricks. I will be incorporating some of this information into my plugins, or at least allowing users to access them if they choose. That said, if a user is interested in SEO, I’d highly recommend them do a course. For this session, I was sitting beside Adrian Downing, who actually taught Aladdin some of the things he was showing, so I got even more SEO info from him.

Also there was Richie Crossley, a Maltease fashion photographer based in London. Richie has a knack for being the centre of attention, so needless to say we got on like a house on fire. Richie showed off a few techniques for fashion and headshots, as well as talking about rapport. Check out his site, it’s well worth a look.

The final thing I really enjoyed was sharing a twin room with Steve Ramsden. Although the house was reasonably large, most people were sharing. This is actually great for networking, and sharing with Steve was no exception. We had great getting up and going to bed talks about sales, marketing, training and a whole host of other things. Steve took the photo above BTW.

One other benefit to the course is that the models used for the classes are available for hire. Why is this good? Well shots taken during workshops and classes are usually disqualified from competition. By booking the model and shooting yourself, the images shot may be used for portfolio and competitions. Of course you also pay the model for their time!

Kudos to Paul for organising this week, his 5th of this kind. I know I’ll be there next year, assuming I get invited!