Continued from How I Became a Glamour Photographer: The Foundation.

I wish I could remember how I ended up there.

It was really important and ultimately changed my life. It is changing my life to this day.

Where?

GarageGlamour.com

Garage Glamour was a website started and run by Rolando Gomez. It was dedicated to the idea of doing glamour photography on a small scale. You aren’t trying to be Playboy or Maxim, you are a “guy in a garage”.

I don’t much remember what I did on there at first. Probably just looked at the pictures. I didn’t have much of a camera, I was still shooting film. I remember shooting some stuff and getting it developed straight to CD at Wal-Mart. Not the recommended place to get your film developed.

Then I decided to go to a workshop.

My First Workshop

It was August of 2004 and I went to Rolando’s “Glamour, Beauty & the Nude” workshop in San Antonio. Here’s what I blogged about before I went.

My big fears are I won’t be a good enough photographer and won’t know I shot nothing by crap till I get the pictures developed. My hopes are I’ll learn how to take better portraits in general so I can take pictures of friends that they will love. And I want to learn about the business of glamour photography. I’d like another hobby that makes some money.

Well I fixed the first problem. The night before I the workshop I bought a Nikon D70.

I was glad I did.

The workshop spanned two days and after the first day I went back to my hotel room and downloaded the images to my laptop. Looking at them I realized the eyes were soft. This means I wasn’t focused on them. Part of that was caused by very narrow depth of field, part by the newbie mistake I talk about in my 10 Common Mistakes of New Model Photographers report. (Sign up to the left to get that report)

It was a very interesting shooting experience. Here’s an overview I posted back then about how the workshop worked.

The workshop was very busy. You got there at 9, there was about and hour, hour and a half of talking and then you started shooting and kept going until 5:30 or so. You ate lunch standing up in a few minutes between shoots.

There was no shortage of shooting the models. I took over 284 images. That’s how many I brought back, I know I deleted some in camera if the eyes were soft or there was camera shake or any of the other obvious problems. At least I did the second day. The first day I took a lot of picture that would have been good, but the eyes were soft.

A Walk To Remember

One thing I do remember very well. After I got back to Houston, the Mrs and I went for a walk on the greenbelt. I was holding her hand and telling her how much fun I had and I remember saying,

“This is an art I can do.”

I never considered myself much of an artist. I can’t draw or paint or play an instrument.

But I realized I could take pictures and create something artistic. It wasn’t about the beauty of the model. It wasn’t about seeing a woman naked. No, it was art.

It changed my life, and I have been pursuing this art for the 4 years and counting.

Looking at the images below I almost cringe. I see mistakes and low quality I didn’t see at all back then. Those were really great images to me. In my portfolio for years to come.

I must have improved from those images in the next shoot, right? Actually no. I got worst. I’ll show you some bad images next time.

Here are some images from that first workshop.