“If photography is complicated you’re not doing it right.”

Words imparted to his audience by master portrait and boudoir photographer Damien Lovegrove, when I attended his ‘Concept to Print’ masterclass last Tuesday night.  And over the next three hours I sat enthralled as he demonstrated his very uncomplicated approach to image making.

Paul Jones meets Damien Lovegrove

I’m not going to give all Lovegrove’s secrets away.  For that I’d advise you to book a training course with him or watch his training videos.  What I will say is that he was very generous with his knowledge and keen to answer any questions.  Working with professional model Carla Monaco, Lovegrove covered various lighting setups from using one light, two lights then three lights.  He took us through the benefits of hard light and soft light.  He showed his Hollywood lighting setups.  He explored working with a model and which poses work best.  And covered how to add more interest to the background.

All shots were captured on his Fujifilm X-Pro1 and X100 cameras.  As he passed the cameras around the audience after each set, we were all dumbstruck with the quality of the raw images on the back of the camera.

For the last part of the evening Damien took us through the way he processes images in Lightroom (very minimally) and then printed out his favourite images from the night onto fine art portfolio paper.  The prints were stunning! 

I left the session feeling deeply inspired, but not before buying a signed copy of his lavish art book homage to model Chloe-Jasmine Whichello.  As a collector of photography books, this was one that I just had to have.   I’m blown away by the images in it.  The book is available to buy on Amazon, so go and check it out.

I’m going to leave you with an earlier studio shot of mine that was an attempt at the Hollywood style.  (Click to enlarge)

Thanks for reading and feel free to share any comments about Lovegrove or training courses.