Toronto Meetup

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take. — Wayne Gretzky

The shots below were some of the few shots I took at an awesome get together of a group of photographers and models on facebook, in hindsight I should have taken a lot more.

I’ve been to a few meetups recently and they have been great for exposure to new people and new situations. I would therefore recommend them to any photographer that does not have to time to plan their own shoots. I’ve organised model shoots and with a full time job scheduling models is difficult given that they also have jobs or school. I’ve been to shoots with 2 organisers on meetup.com, Stephen Loban and Phil Sutherland (Toronto Photography Group) and they have both delivered great experiences. Stephen takes more time to explain what he is doing and will take some suggestions for the setup so his sessions are better learning experiences, but Phil’s sessions are well organised and operate like clockwork. The key is to find one that fits what you are looking for.

The following photo is from the 2nd from the #portraitmeetto group and I plan to go to the next one. This is not a group on meetup.com but instead they are on facebook. This was different, but was definitely great fun. I think close to 100 people met at the Dave Balfour Park (models and photographers) and just had fun shooting in different spots, this was more social and informal setting and folks just wandered to various settings. This is a perfect chance to work with different types of models in a very informal setting and to meet other creative personalities. the session was about 3 hours long but I didn’t stay for the full session.

The photo below is of Clarissa, a stunning model (instagram: @claritymodel). I didn’t get a chance to hone all my photoshop retouching skills because she looked almost flawless straight out of camera. However, I did some colouring because this was shot in a dark forest and there was a strong green cast. I removed the green from her face, cropped out some of the crowd and added some highlights. I start working on the image to try out something (in this case it was adding highlights with luminosity masking in photoshop) and I just posted it here.

Photoshop work below was colour grading and some dodge burn. I tried out creating highlights with luminosity masks. My retouching goal is to deliver finished products at the level of Natalia Taffarel, Pratik Naik or Julia Kuzmenko. My finished products still look more like portraits than beauty. I’ve improved a lot in the past 3-5 months so I may just end up there one day.

Photos were taken with the Nikon D810, ISO 500, F2.8, lens Zeiss 135mm APO F2, natural light in densely treed area.