Patrick Arends
Photography

Overview forTravel

London portrait shoot

Reflecting on my recent photographic journey with Arteh Odjidja (see post below this one), I thought it would be good to re-visit my first photography workshop with Thorsten Overgaard in London. Thorsten is a professional photographer, writer and educator from Aarhus, Denmark and travels around the world shooting assignments and hosting photography workshops. He shoots Leica cameras only and has a very down to earth approach to photography, making this fantastic muse very simple to understand, and improve your skills instantly.

My most memorable moment in the workshop was the portrait shoot. Thorsten covered all the essentials you need to keep in mind when shooting portraits. Finding a location, measuring light, calibration of the colour temperature, how to use a reflector to improve the articulation, the composition of the whole, keeping an eye out for the little details that you can’t really expect to see on the back of your camera. These were all very practical and aimed at improving the results. Simply no fluff around the edges! (more...)

Deserted City?

A quick evening visit to Oxford turned out to be intriguing! A city so well known for its' Harry Potter-esque quality of historical buildings, with so many students and even more tourists can actually feel deserted! Imagine starting your city centre visit at 5pm, on a fairly grim and cold day in early March. You would expect the streets to be filled with tourists, cars honking their horns to get through. Bicycles passing by left right and centre. However, the moment you turn into a side street, there's no one there! Is it because they're all done with shopping and sight seeing and have retreated to the comfort of an English Pub? Are they hiding in some hidden backstreet beer garden? (more...)