Peters Valley, 2008

Anouk

This past weekend was spent at Peters Valley in a workshop on Portraiture. The instructor was Herbert Ascherman, a portraitist from Cleveland.

As always, the workshop was fun and challenging. Peters Valley is such a wonderful place - remote, quiet, with beautiful light (especially early in the morning) and often with delightful fog and lots of animals (rabbits, deer, turkeys, and even the occasional black bear, etc). It was unusually quiet this weekend with workshops in fine metals, tapestry weaving, blacksmithing, and photography, so the dormitories were not crowded.

Herb is an excellent photographer who uses an 8x10 view camera in most of his portraiture, making Pt/Pd prints. He has strong opinions, but he is also the first to observe that his views are his and others can differ. His work is very traditional - he insists on using a tripod for every image, formal posing, and 'proper' dress (no short sleeve shirts, no advertising on clothing, etc). He does do some street work - but his approach (with the 8x10) is anything but casual.

After initial introductions, we were assigned to photograph each of the other members of the class. The image here of Anouk resulted from that exercise. That afternoon, we shared work that we had brought to the session.

On Saturday morning, we had a shooting session in one of the Peters Valley barns with two models, Norm and Danielle. Norm had worked as a figure model (for drawing), but this was Danielle's first experience. We photographed them both clothed and nude. Then, on Sunday, we drove to the summer home of one of the class members in nearby Milford, PA where we photographed Danielle and another model, Dana, in a forest setting, surrounded by large boulders and blueberry bushes.

On Monday, we went back to Milford to photograph total strangers on the street. Actually, I found the light to be entirely too harsh on the street, and that I could get better results by going indoors. And a secondary advantage of that approach was that indoors meant air conditioning! Finally, we again paired off with other class members on Tuesday morning for self-portraits, with the 'buddy' standing in for composing and framing, and then releasing the shutter when everything was done.

Overall, the workshop was fabulous. However, there was one downside. I had corresponded with Herb many months ago about his plans for the weekend, and he said at that time that he was planning for either film or digital. But later he appeared to have changed his mind and opted for a process with faster turnaround. I did film on Saturday, and was able to process the negatives, but there simply wasn't time enough to make proof prints for review. For the rest of the session I borrowed a Canon 20D digital from Andy Schmitt so that I could get the same turnaround time as the others in the class. I did do a few 4x5 monochrome portraits, and of course a number of landscape and architecture studies.

Anouk Dirkse was another of the students in the class. Originally from Holland, she came to the US 18 years ago to work as a fashion model. She was very easy to photograph!