As you know, I was recently on Jura, running a two day photography workshop for the winners of a competition I judged last year. On the first day we were out and about, but on the second day it was cold, wet and rainy so we stayed at the Jura Lodge and shot a range of portraits: some with strobes, some with natural light. This shot is probably my favourite, a portrait of Todd Winter's father. Todd was one of the competition winners, and Sidney came along to accompany him on his trip.

He was a great sport - we posed him mercilessly for most of the day - and I'm sure we all got a range of great shots.

And it's also a fitting image to post today as I've spent pretty much all of it critiquing the first assignment images for my new course The Art of Black and White Photography: Assignments. And while it was a long day – critiquing 42 images takes time – it was an enjoyable one: they've produced some great work so far.

It's not often that I post two shots side-by-side but in this case I couldn't decide between the two and didn't think it was worth posting them as separate images. Both were taken during our photo tour to the Venice Carnival earlier this year.

In other news ...

I'm really pleased to announce that we're launching a new course today: The Art of Black and White Photography: ASSIGNMENTS, designed to follow on from The Art of Black and White Photography on Udemy.

It's a four week, online, assignment-based course, and if you think you might be interested, just click the link below.

The Art of Black and White Photography: ASSIGNMENTS

We've scheduled two occurrences so far – May and June – and while there are quite a few places available for June there are only for (from 25) left for May: so sign up soon if you want to take part! Oh, and if you haven't signed up for the Udemy course yet (which you'll need to do before you can work through the new course), we're offering it at half-price for anyone who signs up for The Art of Black and White Photography: ASSIGNMENTS.

And if you're interested, Antony Northcutt has posted a great article on his blog about why he's going to be taking the course in May. Thanks Antony :-)

Here's another RX1 shot from Dubai: a portrait of one of the drivers who took us out into the desert for my Landscape Photography workshop.

This is the second shot I've posted of this guy, one of my students from my Art of Black and White Photography workshop in Dubai and, while this one isn't nearly as dramatic, I do think it does a better job of capturing his personality: he wasn't quite as serious as my first shot would suggest :)

On the basis that my last couple of shots were rather unattractive – an abandoned microwave oven and a pile of goat's legs – I thought I'd post something a bit prettier today: one of the fabulous models we worked with during our 2013 Venice Carnival Photo Tour.

This is one of my students, shot during my Art of Black and White Photography workshop at this year's Gulf Photo Plus training event. My reason for shooting it was twofold.

First, he was a great looking guy. Second, I wanted to shoot an image to illustrate a point I make about converting portraits to black and white, i.e. that you can vary the black and white conversion process to either minimise or maximise facial detail. For example, if you use the Channel Mixer or Black and White tool and apply the Red Filter preset you can minimise facial detail (great for women and kids). At the other extreme, if you use the Blue Filter preset (as I did in this case) you can emphasise facial detail.

There's a counter-intuitive element here – using the Red Filter can make a portrait overly bright (there's lots of red tones in a person's face), while using the Blue Filter can make them too dark – but if you compensate for this using a curve you can create some very striking portraits.

On which note, if you're interested in learning more about black and white photography/post-production, take a look at my latest course on Udemy, The Art of Black and White Photography. It covers pretty much the entire black and white workflow, including portraiture, and usually costs $79.00. For the rest of this week though (up until midnight on the 24th), you can use the following link to sign up for just $39.00 and join 13K+ people who have already enrolled.

https://www.udemy.com/the-art-of-black-and-white-photography/?couponCode=chromasia_blog_offer

This offer is open to anyone, so please feel free to share the link.

This was shot in the Fish Market in Dubai, and while I have absolutely no idea what he was trying to tell me, or show me, I'm pleased I took the shot.

This is the first of quite a few portraits I'l be posting from my trip to Dubai, and it's probably one of my favourites: shot in the Hindu temple in the Textile Souq during my Shoot the Street workshop for GPP2013.

I'm not quite sure why there was a pigeon sitting on this young woman's shoulder, but as she seemed so happy about it it was definitely worth a shot :)

A somewhat more flattering portrait of guy I photographed in my previous entry.

I'll be writing a detailed blog post about our 2013 Venice Carnival Photo Tour soon – I'm just waiting till I get some of the truly great images from our students so I can put a gallery together – but in the meanwhile I'll post some of my shots here. This one was taken early on Saturday morning down at Saint Mark's square. It was freezing cold, windy, and I forgot to take my gloves, but I'm really glad we went: there were some fabulous costumes, more of which I'll post over the coming days.

Here's another shot from my recent trip to Dubai: a portrait of one of my one-to-one students. Sometimes this training malarky can be tough :)

A shot of my good friend Isaa AlKindy in the desert near Dubai, created by blending two RAW conversions to create the gradient between the yellow/orange sunset and the blue sky above.

This is another portrait from our trip to Oman earlier this year, and while I'm not entirely convinced I made the most of this one (I feel there's something about it that's not quite right, but I can't tell you what) I did think it was worth posting.

As always, let me know what you think.

Every time I've been to the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat (Oman) I've taken photographs of the huge chandelier that hangs in the centre of the main hall, and each time I've ended up with some reasonable shots, but nothing that I've been sufficiently impressed with to share. This one though, I like a lot better.

This is another portrait from our recent GPP Faces and Places Photo Tour to Oman and it's also the image I've added as this week's Mini-PSD as the processing was quite interesting, i.e. it was partially desaturated using the Channel Mixer and then toned with a curve.

Since starting work on my (relatively) new Udemy course on black and white photography pretty much all of my black and white conversions have been intentional, i.e. I've started out knowing that I was going to produce a black and white image. With this image though I did try to produce a colour version but just couldn't seem to get it to work. Maybe I've just been spending too long looking at black and white images, or maybe this is another example of an image that just doesn't have the same impact in colour. I don't know. I am happy with how it turned out though.

And on a related note: today's the last day do grab a $20 early bird discount on my The Art of Black and White Photography course. If you haven't seen it yet: we launched it a month ago today and now have 408 subscribers and 17 five star reviews. A HUGE thank you to everyone who's signed up so far :-)

Here's another portrait of one of the many fabulous people we met during our GPP Faces and Places Photo Tour to Oman earlier this year. If you haven't been, you should, it's a beautiful place to visit.

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11.32am on 15/3/12 Canon 5D Mark II EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 150mm f/4.5 1/80 aperture priority -0.7 evaluative 200 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none no

It's rare that I post unflattering portraits, but I couldn't resist this one: taken on Blackpool's North Pier last weekend.

Despite overexposing this one by one stop (as you'll see if you take a look at the original) it's a truly dreadful exposure and I don't know what possessed me to shoot it this way. That said, I doubt I'll bump into this lady again, and I couldn't resist her smile, so decided it was worth going the extra step in Photoshop to create an image that did her more credit. I'm not sure it's ended up quite where I wanted but it's definitely a marked improvement on my lacklustre original :-)