Book Review: Picture Perfect Practice

I first learned about Roberto, his work and this book in WPPI this year. His talk was amazing and I learnt so much from it. Fast forward to this summer when I strolled around Chapter with Adria, I found this book and bought it right away. It had then been my bible at night for a couple months. This month, I re-read this book and still learnt some more. I have decided to write a review on this because not many of my photographer friends know about this book or Valenzuela. Other than being an award winning photographer, Roberto himself is one of the judges in different WPPI award categories. Thus, I really enjoyed his thought process in this book and tips to create world-class photographs. Here is a link to his work on Junebug Weddings.

When Roberto was on creativeLIVE this summer, he pushed the participants to their boundaries. I felt the same way reading this book. Here are a few things I found useful and have improved my people photography skills:

– Roberto decided to focus on four sections that play a big role in people photography: locations, poses, execution and deliberate practice

– One of the basic things I learned in the locations part is: how we don’t see things as they are anymore. When we were kids, we see/describe things based on their colour and geometry shape. For example, we call it a stop sign now, back then we call it a red octagon. Roberto said that one of the steps to take excellent photographs is to go back to that stage and discover things based on their shapes and colours. Coming from a business and not a design background, I continuously train myself on this. And I do see the difference on how I incorporate and compose my images now than before I heard him saying it again and again of how important this is.

– The rest of the chapter on locations cover balance, parallel lines, symmetry, colour elements, depth, shadows, silhouettes, reflections, patterns and repetitions, framing, involving paintings and artworks, contrasts, lens flare, and using walls/textures/translucent surfaces. If you have taken basic and intermediate composition and design courses, I don’t think you will learn anything new. I have learned most of these in photography classes, but I do still enjoy following his thought processes when creating some of his award winning images. He included a lot of his work images in these sections and as a bonus, he sometimes showed the before and after.

– Moving on to the next chapter: poses. Oh boy, I learnt a lot from here. Roberto is very sensitive to what message you are trying to convey from the image and how you place/direct your clients/model’s eyes, mouth, face, hands, basically everything in the image to send your message to the audience. I will give a couple hints here and you need to buy the book and read the rest yourself: 😉
a. Ask your couple to hold hands softly and with loose interlace. When people are nervous, they tend to squeeze and it shows on the images if you pay extra attention.
b. The X-factor, don’t pose your couple forehead to forehead or nose to nose. Their faces have to crisscross because naturally people don’t do that and the pose is more believable this way (because the couples act naturally and not forced to cross their comfort zone)

– In the last chapter of his book, he mentioned about creating a log book and keeping track your practice hours in it. The log book works in a different way too, such as keeping a list of images you want to achieve in certain situations. I started one and was not able to keep track both the log book and my journal. My journal keeps track of the million things I need to do anyway and I am good at finishing tasks and crossing them off from there. So I choose to log my practice and improvement this way. It does help before a wedding or a session to remind me a few images that I need to create to add into my portfolio. As a further hint, I took picture on my phone of this list to remind me further on the wedding day.

I believe I did not give away too much and I still encourage you to spend some time browsing through this book at Chapters or any other bookstore to see if this book is a good fit for you. Hopefully you find this useful and here are links to the other book reviews I did in the last months: by Tim Sanders and by Simon Sinek. If you know a great book that we might enjoy, give us a shout!

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Jenn

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