Active Photokaki forum users would know who is Vodka. I have been following Vodka’s work for sometime. An active contributor in the Portrait section, his pictures rake in high count of comments and views from forum users. Funny thing though, I have never met Vodka in person despite us poking each other on Facebook. He said he has seen me in SIC Sepang before, and I do recall seeing a guy in resemblance to Vodka. So best thing about Blackberry, we have BBM. With the recent dip in Blackberry phone prices and as well super crazy price from Digi, more people are on Blackberry. Added Vodka into my BBM list. One day, he asked me if I am interested to join his workshop. I said why not? Title of the workshop was Beauty Workshop. I ll be honest, I m a guy who has zero knowledge on Studio lights and I am equipped with really minimal photoshop skill. A chance to learn from one of the best in commercial photog, I said yes.

Workshop was set to yesterday (Sunday) from 2 pm onwards. Location was at Vodka’s place in Kuchai Lama. Sorry, but I really have to CURSE malaysia road signs. I headed to Kuchai from Jalan Istana. The bloody signboard was so damn small that I failed to notice it. The turning into Kuchai is right after the turning into MEX highway. So crap..I missed it. Fine. I did a U Turn at Desa Petaling. Again, poor placement of signboards confused me further. I missed the turning into Kuchai again. Had to do another U turn at Chan Sow Lin. Wasted my petrol and time. Anyway I got to the studio safely. Odd enough, I was early too. Kong aka DKBU had not arrived yet. Met Kenny Yee the MUA ( he is a PRO k?) who I followed on Facebook too. Of course Face to face to Vodka for the first time. Nice fella. He reminds me of Bosco Wong. Why? He has a diamond ear ring on the left lobe of his ear too. Met lovely Evyan for the first time too. I left them to be as Kenny was busy preparing Evyan for the shoot. I was already impressed with the workshop. Not many will provide a commercial MUA for workshop. And Evyan is a well established model too.

Kong arrived and we were instructed to power up our notebooks. Photoshop CS3 and above is required and of course Lightroom 3. Vodka explained that there will be 3 types of makeup for the session, Nude (plain makeup), Glamor and the last one I cant recall. But the makeup was awesome!~ I got to ask Vodka again later. 3 different lighting setup will be used in the session. 3 lights for the first session (White Background), 1 light for the 2nd session (White background) and 1 light again for the last session (Black background). White balance card is a must in the session. This is to correct the white balance later in post processing. Another essential tool is the light meter. This is to get the correct exposure. We started off with F16 1/125 and ISO 100. Took some shots and off the post processing session. Vodka said we were to gentle with model. LOL. I can t really direct. Kong was having fun doing direction. Kenny was at the side waiting to sort out the baby hairs and rouge hairs.

The first thing involved was to import the pictures into Lightroom. Vodka stressed on the use of Lightroom Catalogues which made the whole process easier and less messier. He guided us on his steps on beauty post processing. It was a little bit too fast for me as I was having problem in dealing with a 21MP Raw file. Hahah. My notebook was struggling to cope with the massive file. But eventually I managed to follow. I had to take some notes down. The post processing steps were pretty easy to follow. Practice make perfect according to Vodka. I noticed that the most important step in the whole post processing part is actually the cleaning session. To ensure a good output later, the base for further processing must be good. Clean up involves cloning out the moles, zits, wrinkles and etc. The one done by Vodka has a really good texture to it while mine was a little bit unnatural. Hahahah. Practice Practice! says Vodka. I guess it s real. I am going to put in at least one hour of Photoshop session a day from now on. Some other steps were taught and I ll leave it to curios people to join the workshop in order to know more. But I can say that the final output really pop. Details were really good.

I think the workshop is worth attending. Especially newbies. But I do wish to  learn more info about the lights set up. So Vodka, I ll be back for more workshops. Here is a picture to share with all. Pardon my limited post processing skills. I ensure you guys will see better stuffs from me in future. As usual, I m a fan of BW pictures. Hahaha. So I converted the pic into Black and White. Will post the color version once I am happy with the images. Cheers!~

Inspired by Potatoe. But hard to achieve the correct composition. Will try again