Fine Art Photography Lesson

As a photographer, it is important to keep learning new techniques and to familiarise yourself with other styles and approaches, not only in your photographic genre, but others as well. On Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to meet one of the UK’s (and world famous) fine art creators, Mark Fearnley.

Coming from a landscape photography background, I am relatively new to the street, urban and architectural style photography. And, while I feel I’ve made some significant progress in this area, I knew that I needed someone way beyond my skillset to provide some insight and direction that will allow me to develop onto the next level. Reaching out to Mark to join one of his 121 sessions, I was already a great admirer of his work and, while I didn’t intend to replicate it, I did like his style of photography and wanted to learn how he had adopted it.

Meeting someone you admire from a professional perspective can sometime backfire, but not in Mark’s case. He was a great coach and a very friendly and approachable person. By the end of the session, saying goodbye was like saying goodbye to a friend. Mark styled the five hour session to adapt to how best to develop my existing street photography onto the next level, and the difference to his approach and mine soon became apparent. You could see that he was “thinking out of the box” and constantly searching for a unique artistic perspective that would ultimately create something different. By the end of the five hours, I had produced photographs that had challenged my thinking, resulting in some great photos.

A big thank you to Mark, an inspiration and basically just a really nice bloke - who happens to be fantastic at creating fine art content.