Tired and happy after four days of solid corporate photography work.

Bob Schneider. 

In the last four days I've shot thousands of images for a corporate client in conjunction with the Formula One race in Austin, Texas. I spent three evenings photographing and being well fed in three of Austin's finest restaurants. This morning a beautiful Austrian woman made me a latté and brought me a basket of warm croissants. I photographed and watched people watch Formula One cars go around and around the track and before that I photographed Porsches going around and around the track and before that I watched a flock of Ferraris fling themselves around the same track. Mostly from a very nice vantage point.

Since it was both Halloween weekend and also Formula One weekend my client graciously put me into a room at the Four Seasons Hotel so I wouldn't have to get through traffic to get in to downtown each day. The stay at the Four Seasons also negated any sort of parking hassles. An extra bonus was the option to use the Hotel's premium internet connection which was about ten times faster than my service in the studio. 200 files need uploading? No problem, I've got and extra three minutes and fifteen seconds. 

I started out using the Olympus EM-5 cameras, switched to a mix of Olympus and Panasonic on the second day and then switched to a mix of Olympus and Nikon for the last two days. There are benefits to each system and once you've had a camera in your hand for an hour or so all the muscle memory of settings comes roaring back.

Most used two lenses were the Nikon 18-140mm and the Panasonic 12-35mm. Both, in their own way, are brilliant. 

I just got home, kissed the dog and the wife and made my way back out to the studio to edit down a day's worth of shooting so I can make a final, share-able web gallery for today. Someone won the Formula One race. Everyone else lost. I didn't bother slowing down to find out who (added: Hamilton). 

I'll flesh out some photo stuff tomorrow but I'm happy to have another assignment wrapped up and ready for final post processing and delivery. But mostly it feels good to be back home.

A couple of quick questions about workshops in the next year. Answer if you can...

I've taught portrait lighting workshops from time to time and I get mail almost weekly asking me "when is your next workshop???".  I'd like to add in some workshop experiences to my repertoire and my schedule next year but I'm a marketing geek and I don't want to offer something that no one really wants. So I have some questions and by you answering them I hope to understand what kind of workshop you would like me to teach and where, in the U.S. we should have workshops. I'm also interested to hear if anyone in the E.U. is interested. 

So, here are my questions:

1. Do you have any interest at all in taking a workshop on portrait lighting with me? 

2. Would you want a "hands on" experience, a lecturing/demo experience or a mix of the two?

3. What cool cities in the U.S. would you travel to if we did workshops there? (I vote for Denver to start....).

4. Would you travel to Austin, Texas for a workshop?

5. What would you like to come out of the workshop with? New techniques? More confidence? A new circle of friends?

6. Any interest in a workshop teaching best practice of portrait lighting with continuous lights?

7. Would you rather just have dinner, go out for drinks and sit around talking about photography with me till the bars close? 

Answer all the questions, some of the questions or none of the above questions. Make up new questions. Tell me not to waste my time. Tell me to spend more time on this. Go all freeform and just comment about your experiences and what you like and don't like about workshops you've lived through. It's all very useful to me. But I would like to hear from as many people as possible. You can be anonymous, this will not be graded.  Thanks for your input.  Kirk

P.S. Don't mention names but I'm also interested in your stories about the best and the worst workshops you've taken and what made them so bad or so good. Thanks, KT