This week I attended the wildly popular OneLight Workshop that talented Atlanta photographer Zack Arias puts on all around the country. These workshops have a relatively small class size of a little over a dozen, and sell out very quickly… I was thrilled last year to see that he was coming to this area, and signed up right away. The workshop, hosted at Baton Rouge photographer Anna-Karin Skillen’s studio, was attended by photographers from throughout the Gulf Coast region, with several coming in from Florida, and even one who flew in all the way from Canada.
The workshop centers around the use of a single portable strobe to light on-location portraits, crafting shots ranging from simple and effective to dramatic and creative. Though Zack is literally a walking encyclopedia of lighting and composition knowledge, he is surprisingly modest and approachable.
The first half of the day was spent in a classroom setting, where Zack instructed on the nuts and bolts of this type of lighting. Later in the afternoon, we headed out to some really cool locations with our subjects (Leigh, a professional model, and Justin, a tuba student from LSU) for the fun part… the practical application of what we had learned. Returning to the studio afterwards, we broke off into small groups and did some more shooting on our own, then sat down with Zack to review images and go over post-processing techniques before wrapping up the workshop at around midnight.
It was a great experience, one I would recommend to any photographer wanting to learn more about creative off-camera lighting!
