From Fishing to Fashion Photography: Peter Coulson on Learning Teaching and Doing What You Love3/31/2017
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From Fishing to Fashion Photography: Peter Coulson on Learning, Teaching, and Doing What You Love http://ift.tt/2ohyTog Photo: Amy by Peter Coulson Peter Coulson talks to 500px about his workshops and his personal journey as a photographer. 500px: How long have you been a full-time photographer and at what point in your career did you make the switch to full time? I had a business in fishing. When I started shooting for magazines, I didn’t have enough time to run my business and keep photographing—so it turned into full-time photography for magazines. During one of my assignments, I did my first shoot in a studio. A studio assistant was employed to help on the day because I knew nothing. I fell in love with the studio. That night I went home and told my wife, “Love, we are going to go broke, but I am making a transition from fishing to models.” She supported me, and it started from then onwards. That was the point I was truly full-time, as I had no other income.
I never had the intentions of getting into the educational side of photography. But I had a small importer in Australia ask me if I could demonstrate their lighting at a trade show. This resulted in a massive crowd around me, asking, where can we pay to see more of this? The importing company heard the feedback and ran workshops from their store for me to teach. I think another major difference is that I try dumb everything down; I don’t try to make myself look better than anybody else. I try show everybody how it is simple if you make it simple; dumbing it right down without making it too technical, otherwise it starts to become really hard. I have no secrets. Anybody can hire a pretty model, awesome location, fancy gowns, stunning makeup and hair, set up one octabox and bang—you create an incredible image. But by doing that, it doesn’t mean you have learned a single thing except that you cannot afford the model, location, gown or hair and makeup—you cannot reproduce this tomorrow. Even though I use beautiful models for the workshops, I use very basic clothing and get the models to do their own hair and makeup, and I shoot in ordinary locations, to show you can create beautiful images without any of the other stuff. This way the participants can go out the next day and do the exact same thing, in their own backyard. What I teach is for people to really learn how to create and recreate anything they like in a very simple way.
With the educational side, especially our new website, I am shooting what I love to shoot for the tutorials. This has also helped me get closer to 1/3. The more I can show the world what I love doing, the more people will want to learn how I do it, and the more I will get booked commercially to do what I love. It feels good to go back to my beliefs that I preach, shoot what I love, and build my business on what I really love to do. 500px: We have a pretty large community of photographers in Dubai, so let’s talk about your upcoming Dubai workshop in mid-April. What can participants expect to learn in the 5-day course? After that, I teach people how to see light and how to manipulate light to do what they want it to do, whether it be flash light, studio light, or natural light. The rest of the workshop is teaching people how to put in emotion and feelings, how to make it real and how to put their own style into their photography, and how to communicate with the models to create the look they are trying to create. Once you have learned how to see the light, everything else is easy. And I teach people how to do this.
The most exciting and rewarding part for me is that I help people really learn to love photography and inspire them to create their own artwork. Watching that transition is amazing; listening to the conversations changing from “How do you do this?” to knowing how to do it, and asking more in-depth questions in regards to taking their photography to a whole new level. For people that run their own studios and work as photographers, they come to my workshop and realise they have been stuck in a box, shooting the same things—and I teach them and hopefully inspire them enough to get out of the box and do what they love. Don’t miss out on these exclusive discount codes for 500px readers: Dubai 5 Day Workshop discount code (15% off): 500pxdubai The post From Fishing to Fashion Photography: Peter Coulson on Learning, Teaching, and Doing What You Love appeared first on 500px ISO. Photography News via 500px / Blog https://iso.500px.com March 31, 2017 at 03:31AM
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