Once a year in February, people gather from all over the world to attend the Venice Carnival, a festival that is world-famous for its extravagant masks and costumes. It is also a big draw for portrait and street photographers, who treat it as an opportunity to hone their skills on a unique set of subjects.
This year, X-Photographers Tomasz Trzebiatowski from FujiLove and Damian Lovegrove from ProPhotoNut decided to organise a workshop for twelve people during the Carnival festivities.
While Tomasz concentrated on teaching street photography, Damian shared his personal lighting and portrait techniques, using both masked and unmasked models as his subjects. Since the Carnival is such an immensely popular subject, his idea was to “make his mark on the genre” by bringing his own lighting and applying his own creative style to the shoot.
For Damian, day one consisted of shooting two different unmasked models as figures within a larger landscape using off-camera flash techniques. Doing so would prepare the workshop attendees for the shoot with the Carnival models on the following day. In the meantime, Tomasz worked with a small group on the streets of Venice, sharing his approach to street photography and camera techniques.
As you can imagine, both Tomasz and Damian used the Fujifilm X-Pro2 to conduct the workshop. In his post, Damian recalls a humorous anecdote about a portrait he was trying to take at a low angle. Being used to the tilting screen of the X-T1, he found himself having to lie in a puddle to get the shot, much to the amusement of the DSLR-toting photographers around him.
You can check out Damian’s full report about the Venice workshop here.
You can check out Tomasz’s gallery of street images here.
