Tonight I've had the pleasure of attending the second MiniClick Photography talk, again held at Add the Colour.  This month's was with Kris Mitchell who talked us through his voyage into photography and his experiences learning about portraiture and lighting via a 365 project, a 52 week project and the concept of paying it forward - taking photos of the "people who serve the community and probably don't get as much recognition as they should" (taken from Kris's flickr description).

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My key takeaways were:

  • have courage to ask people if you can take their photo - they might even say Yes
  • think about the process of getting to your perfect photography - don't be too quick to dismiss the ones that didn't make it, Kris has a lot of contact sheet photographs which show the evolution of a shoot, i.e. from this, to this, with this lighting in this configuration
  • don't feel too bad if a project doesn't work out - just make sure you learn from it

I've enjoyed the two talks I've seen as part of this series so far (read about the last one here), and plan to make attending them a regular occasion.  Jim is currently looking for more volunteers to talk next year, and is especially interested in hearing from female photographers.  So, get in touch with him if you're interested.