Courses and tutors and learning

Courses and tutors and learning

What are you looking for when you sign up for any sort of course?

You may be after specific solutions to a particular problem, or wanting to get a start so that you can gain traction in a new area. Almost whatever you do, you are going to be buying something that is only partly useful to you: whether this is something that you can live with depends on how hard it is to dig out the thing you want, how much chaff you need to discard to get to the wheat – and, crucially, how useful the content is to you. There’s the money thing, too. If you have a really annoying and important problem, you’ll probably pay quite a lot (in time and effort as well as in money) to find a solution.
For the third time since lockdown, I’ve signed up for an online video tutorial: it’s the second time I’ve paid for it. Originally a live broadcast (which allowed those signed in advance to ask questions), it’s long, and was broadcast at a time that didn’t suit me. It’s a Thomas Holm erotic nude workshop, with a model called Lilith Etch, and it’s five hours long.

The length allows for far more explanation and analysis, which is (at the very least) interesting. There’s an awful lot in there, including a psychological explanation of what makes a successful image – and I can analyse images that I’ve shot in these terms, including the way that a good picture makes you notice it, engages your attention, and then rewards the attention with interesting detail. I worked from this in my Three Stages of Looking’ blog.

It appealed to me that the model and photographer hadn’t planned what to do in any detail… Even for a live tutorial, the Great Plan consisted of putting four white posing boxes in front of a white background. At one point near the end, Lilith emphasised the importance of the photographer creating a safe space for the model to work: both she and Holm put a lot of emphasis on relaxation and having fun making pictures. That’s actually far more important than having a mood board.

Also, priceless advice, and probably not giving away any secrets – always remember to put the flash trigger on the camera, and switch it on.

In the last hour or so, TH deals with the editing side of a couple of images. He uses Photoshop with a skin smoothing plugin called Imagenomic, and does a lot of work with curves, dodging and burning. There’s a deal of precision and management of tones and contrast in monochrome. Interestingly, he uses dodge and burn at much higher levels than I usually do – 10% opacity, or even 20% with the brush tool on an adjustment layer. This is complicated stuff by my standards – that’s probably why he’s making a living from his pictures and I’m not…

That part went far too fast for me: suffice it to say that one of the moves involved feathering a mask by 677 pixels, and the overall result is a ripped and bronzed look for the model’s skin. Some of the changes are subtle, and other things that seem to me to be rather distracting (defects in the finish of the posing boxes, for instance) are left untouched. However, this was done live, and a full edit would probably both take longer, and be less constrained by time!



There’s some iffy sound during a slideshow that fills a technical and comfort break, but otherwise there’s an awful lot of material that will benefit any photographer of the nude, whether or not they wish to follow TH’s exploration of erotic images. And, indeed, there’s a lot for anyone who uses studio lighting or works with models in any way.

Five hours is a very long time to pay attention, and it took me nearly two weeks to watch all of it. I feel that the length was telling on both photographer and model at some points – sustaining concentration on taking images for five hours is quite hard work: more so if you are running the whole show, as Holm is. Possibly the ideal is to have one assistant to handle the multiple video feeds and computer programs that Holm uses. (This by contrast with the other paid tutorial, where there were two photographers demonstrating slightly different styles, a model, a makeup artist and two videographers in a much smaller studio, producing a much less useful result, to my eyes.)

That’s nit-picking. Holm is a superb and self-aware photographer, and Lilith matches and mirrors his ability. She’s now on my ‘want to work with’ list when models begin international travel again. And if TH ever runs a workshop in England, I’ll be saving my pennies to attend.

And I’ve downloaded a free trial version of the Imagenomic software, and played with it a bit. It deals only with skin softening, and it seems to me to do it well, and without eliminating all texture and character. Maybe I’ll end up buying it – though it is expensive… But it gives a sort of burnished look that is very attractive for art nudes – not only does it seem to work far faster than Anthropics software (the only sort of competitor I’ve tried before), but is deals only with skin, without trying to reshape faces. Maybe another day…

If all of this has intrigued you, but you are put off by the term ‘erotic’, don’t worry. I’ve checked with Mr Holm, and the same content on composition and lighting are in his art nude workshop, also available online.