{"id":1835,"date":"2013-01-31T10:58:33","date_gmt":"2013-01-31T10:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1835"},"modified":"2013-01-31T10:58:33","modified_gmt":"2013-01-31T10:58:33","slug":"murder-masterclass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1835","title":{"rendered":"Murder & Masterclass"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sometimes a little sceptical about ‘masterclasses’ and workshops, not least because I’ve myself taught a few over the years. While many seem worthwhile and some seem to offer very good value for money, others seem to be merely money-making exercises, charging high fees for the privilege of being taught by someone who has little idea how to teach and only a fairly basic grasp of the subject in which they are supposedly a master.<\/p>\n

I’ve attended a few over the years too and they have varied immensely in quality, from disappointing to highly inspiring. I’m sure I wouldn’t be writing this now if in the 1970s I hadn’t made a trip to Derbyshire for a workshop with Paul Hill and Raymond Moore, something I’ve written about on various occasions, including in Darbis Murmury<\/a>. It was so good I went back several times for more.<\/p>\n

One that I’m sure was very worthwhile – and you can read about it from the point of view of a blogger who attended it <\/a>– was last weekend’s Guardian Masterclass run by Antonio Olmos<\/em>. At the bottom of sarasiobhan’s short piece is a list of ten ‘top things she learnt<\/em>‘ at the class, which she is very complimentary about.\u00a0 Apart from the ‘(use a 50mm fixed lens)’ they are all good sense – really a 50mm makes it hard to get in close enough, and a 28mm or a 35mm is better. Since sarasiobhan already uses a Leica X1 – with a fixed 35mm equivalent lens – it seems in any case redundant advice so far as she is concerned.<\/p>\n

I wrote about Olmos before when he gave a talk to Photo-Forum <\/a>in 2010, and he has produced some great work you can see on his web site<\/a>, as well as regularly in\u00a0 The Guardian where you can also read his advice on street photography<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ve been meaning for some time to mention his ongoing series The Landscape of Murder<\/a> and the features on his blog<\/a> (subtitled with typical self-depreciation ‘Ramblings of a mad visual mind’) are always worth reading. He has a separate blog devoted to his Landscape of Murder<\/a> project which is perhaps the best way to approach this work.<\/p>\n

In my post on his 2010 talk I wrote:<\/p>\n

Olmos also passed on a great bit of advice he himself received, that if you find yourself surrounded by photographers when taking pictures, you are almost certainly in the wrong place.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and a week or so later I thought of his comment again when I was taking this picture:<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9
\nUS Flag, photo of pastor Terry Jones, lighter fuel, US Embassy & Press, Peter Marshall<\/small><\/p>\n

and wrote about it in another post, Flag Burning, Photography & Politics<\/a>. It’s something we very much agree on (and readers may notice that I have often passed on this advice), and his work is distinguished by his thinking about his subjects and finding different ways to approach them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m sometimes a little sceptical about ‘masterclasses’ and workshops, not least because I’ve myself taught a few over the years. While many seem worthwhile and some seem to offer very good value for money, others seem to be merely money-making exercises, charging high fees for the privilege of being taught by someone who has little … Continue reading Murder & Masterclass<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work","category-photo-issues","category-photographers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1835\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}