Two days out with young college students in D.G.Vaishnav college

Conducting a photography workshop is not new to me. But these two days 9th &10th January 2020) with young creative students of Viscom department of D.G.Vaishnav college, Chennai is something worth mentioning. The ‘travel photography’ and ‘event photography’ seminar session on the first day is something I handled for the first time for college students.

After a long drive from Ambitions 4 Photography Academy and managing multiple traffic jams on a working day, we reached the college which is in the middle of the city at Aminchikarai. The travel in the morning hours made us (me, Mufeez – my student and Siddharth K – our senior faculty ) understand the challenges of commuting in Chennai. This is yet another occasion my Mahindra Xylo made me feel very comfortable and proved its performance.

Like getting into a factory, for the first time, we got our visitor ID card with a photo in it. Of course, the photo did not resemble us..that is a separate story. We were received by Dhaanush, a third-year Viscom student and he took us to the HOD, Ms.Vasanth. who gave me a warm welcome and remembered her days in MOP Vaishnav college for women (My daughter Preethaa was studying then at MOP Vaishnav college for women).

I went to the seminar hall of the department and found the place very clean (of course the entire college was clean and green) and students were very disciplined. The LED projector was splendid and gave true colour of my images (this is generally very rare). The session was very interactive and I simply enjoyed the time with the fresh minds.

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The second day was at the studio….wow..that is really big, well laid out and very clean. I started an informal session of understanding the studio lights and its usage. Two students, Puja and Ameer modeled for the session and the images were shot and shown to them live.

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I made them to understand the basic lighting styles, butterfly, Rembrandt, short, broad, rim, double rim, hi-key, low key etc. The entire day was energetic and the students had a packed informative session. The students’ feedback about the sessions were very honest and motivating.

It was also a learning experience for my Full-time Diploma students, Yogeshwaran V, Godwin Infant, Mohammed Mufeez who assisted me along with Siddharth.

I drove back again in thick traffic with the sweet memories of mentoring…!

Experience shared by our Founder Mr.KL Raja Ponsing – known as KLR the photo guru.

For more details to conduct similar workshops in your institution please call 9444 441190

Portraits using extra wide-angle lenses…!

It was an exiting conceptual photo shoot. I was demonstrating our BTEC learners few ideas to show the slap shot / stand up entertainers of ‘EVAM’ funny in the photos. The whole day entertaining, I tried using few unusual lenses normally used for location shoot, for this session to shoot people.

My student, Sameer Singh who is also a stage performer, developed the concept of the shoot. I decided to introduce a lot of intentional distortions to show the expressions funny. As a break through idea, I decided to use 16mm and 20mm lenses for this concept. Though some of the images are really scary, it established the concept of promoting entertaining comedians.  The extended depth of field and lens distortions are the highlights of the concept.

The performing artists, Arvind, Bargav and Alex delivered a lot of actions to establish visual impact through funny body and face expressions. The lighting tried was also very unusual (some times hard bottom lights) to match the theme and purpose. I tried including a ‘microphone’ in most of the shots to justify that the people involved in the pictures are connected to stage performances.

The Diploma in Photography learners of Ambitions 4 Photography Academy understood that it is not always necessary to use soft lights, long tele-zoom lenses and maintain shallow depth of field to shoot portraits. It was a real-time learning for the budding professional photographers.