Portrait Class

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Wednesday evening, 3rd November, saw five DPS members descending on John Alexander’s house for the first in a short series of classes in portrait photography. Alison and Bill Donald, Alan Kinroy, Alan Fox, and myself assembled for an instructive session.

As someone who is very nervous of taking pictures of people, and who dislikes having my own picture taken, I was not at all sure how the evening would go. However, any first night nerves dissipated with John’s calm, instructive and patient manner putting us all at ease.

John explained the workings of his studio equipment – brollies, reflectors, lamps etc, before letting us loose to photograph him as first model of the evening. He’s good at it, and he’s patient! We took turns to photograph him, then we all took turns as photographic subject.

Time flew by. I began to understand how the participants in Shahbaz’s recent studio session might have felt. It’s not easy to direct a model and take good pictures at the same time when you’ve no experience in this art. However, you have to start somewhere, and although I was not overly impressed with my portraiture skills, I did learn a lot. Hopefully, by the end of the course, I’ll have captured a few images to be proud of. Fingers crossed!

And thanks are due to John’s lovely wife who provided a tea, coffee and cakes at the close of the evening.

Ian Neilson

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