There’s Design Night Festival in Tallinn September, 17th – 20th. Part of Disainiöö program – ”for early birds” – Overall Eesti organized photography workshop on 14th, Sept: #designit – compose, shoot, edit & share.
Idea of the photography workshop was to give tips to Design Night Festival participants how they could shoot storytelling and better quality images of design products during all the events of the Festival. We in Overall Eesti waited for 25 people to participate to workshop but 28 people showed up to yesterday. Luckily we had enough chairs and coffee 🙂
Once again we had some product samples from Estonian Design House (Eesti Disaini Maja) – again these beautiful, colorful and cool products which I adore 🙂 So, it was great to do demonstrations with these beautiful design products. Loved it 🙂
Idea of #designit photography workshop was to demonstrate shooting process when people have only cameras or smart phones with them. First of all – you have to decide what you want to shoot and know why you shoot it; what’s the purpose of final image. This is way it comes to storytelling and message of image: you decide that before you press the button. Then it’s also good to think before shooting where your image will be seen: via mobile devices or spread in two pages in newspaper or magazine.
Then we went to shooting process and decision making. We had few words about KISS (Keep It Simple and Straightforward – or version which I prefer: Keep It Simple Stupid 🙂 ), direction of light, main subject, separation of main subject from background etc. and I showed examples of those in demonstrations. But mainly we concentrated on composing images – which different ways to compose image you can choose.
In first demos I used Liina Viira’s beautiful arm warmers. We made few images with different purpose and different composition. In documentary image you can see how product looks like and how it’s used. And then some “feeling” images. We placed arm warmers on simple background and one of participants was “handmodel”.
Next we shot Nulku by Kristina Nurk cosmetics bag. Again we did first documentary image: this is how handbag looks like. Then we did other versions which showed some special features of it, size of it and how it’s used.
In last demo we had bow tie which is made from wood; documentary image, brand and feelings.
After composing & shooting part of workshop we continued to editing part. In shooting demos I used Canon 6D which has wireless system. With help of that I saved images to iPad and begin editing them in Snapseed. Idea of whole shooting process was that we shoot as good file as possible and then we just improve it in editing application. Basically I checked cropping, brightness, contrast, structure, sharpness, saturation and vignetting – if necessary.
At the end – we didn’t have time for that – but my idea was also to show how you could combine your images as one collage f.e. with Diptic application. In that way you can show more details, uses, features, sides etc of product in one image.
So all that in three hours and then we were done! And how fast time went once again 🙂
Thank you for all participants – you were active and you asked questions. That was great!
And thank you once again Overall Eesti, Liis, Martin and Mari-Liis, Canon and Signe. Great to work with you all: everything just rocks!
Behind the scene -images: Liis Mutli