So 2016 was a great year.  A year full of learning and when the opportunity came along to take part in a wedding photography workshop by White Smoke Studio, I just couldn’t pass it up.

Why did I really want to take this workshop?! Well it’s their wedding documentary work that is just amazing.  It was great to be able to meet them in person and to learn in small group from them.

It was a 2 day event full of information.  Dorota and Michał were very opened with us and explained their thought process while showing us their work. This was a very interesting because when you look at there work there is a lot of emotions. It makes you wonder how they manage to be there at the right moment to capture such a powerful image during  weddings which are governed by their own laws.

The workshop also featured a few fun challenges that we all took part in. I must say that these were challenging cause depending on when your turn was you sometimes didn’t have enough time to pre-think what you will do or if you were later on you were challenged cause your ideas would change as you couldn’t do what someone else did.  This was great simply because a lot of us pre-plan and even more create a whole shot-list for a wedding and when things aren’t working out we stress.  Here we had to look for moments, locations, and posing in less time then most photographers take to select a lens they want to shoot with.

After the challenges Dorota and Michal walked us through their editing process. This was also very interesting for myself cause ever since I started shooting weddings I used Capture One for all my edits.  They did touch on C1 because they used a Phase One camera but all their editing was done in LR which was a great intro to a new workflow for me.

Finally the two day event ended with a portfolio review. This for me was really stressful. Ok see having your work reviewed by someone you’ve looked up to, it’s really hard. You want to impress them and want to hear great things, but in reality you’re there to improve  so hearing some constructive criticism is great.  You quickly learn what you’re not paying attention and you see how quickly you improve during your next job.  I was lucky in that way because after the workshop I still had a few weddings where I could try out what I learned.

On top of everything we had Slawek from Leica Poland join the workshop and provide us with camera’s from the wonderful Q, M240 and even the big SL which we could use, play with and even take home over night.