Steve McCurry Masterclass Workshops

Mentioning Steve McCurry and most photographers will immediately refer him to the famous Afghan Girl name Sharbat Gula who grace the National Geographic Magazine cover in 1985. It is an iconic image until this day. Most people especially photographers knows about the story and about how after seventeen years Steve McCurry manage to trace her again. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to attend his class, Steve McCurry Masterclass – Photography Workshop organize by Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in association with Epson Malaysia on 8th January 2010.

I don’t want to write a long story here, just wanted to share something that I learn from his workshops. One participant ask Steve whether he use Flash in his portraiture, and Steve says, he “Rarely” use flash, meaning that most of the time he did not use flash, all picture taken just with natural light. If the light is too dark for the photo opportunity he will find another subject to shoot. It is not so easy to change ISO in those film days, if you have already load ISO 100 film in the camera and suddenly you want to change it to ISO 1000 is not  easy to  change it the way we change it with our new digital camera.

Steve said that most of the time he spent waiting and waiting for hours just to get the right moment or the right subject appear in the frame. Talking about the cover of the book titled The Unguarded Moment where there is a small boy running into the blue alley  in Rajasthan India, he said that he wait almost two hours just to get the right subject and moment to appear in the frame. The point is sometimes we saw a beautiful architecture or landscape but it appears to be empty with no subject in it then we must wait for the right subject to appear, maybe to create a sense of scale between a gigantic Taj Mahal and the people around it or maybe just to add a point of interest so our eyes have something to look for, instead of wandering around in our photograph without any point of interest.

The other thing that I learn regarding portrait photography from Steve is, he doesn’t like to shoot portrait in a bright sunlight, this will make the person squint their eyes because of bright sunlight and that doesn’t make a good portrait. The best thing when shooting portrait is to get the person under the shade or inside the building where there is no strong light coming in and this will make a person open up their eyes and will make an interesting portrait and the person will be more relax and comfortable.

Looking at most of Steve portrait which have very strong emotional feeling into it, one of the participant ask Steve whether he direct the person to “act” that way, to be more sad, to add “drama”, Steve said No, he doesn’t do that kind of thing, the emotion that came from his portrait photography is natural, be it sad or happy, and Steve did mention, please take the time where is possible to ask permission first before taking photograph of a stranger especially for portrait shot where you want that person to look into your lens.

There is exception when photographing people at work or a person doing something in a distance. To cut the story shot, we must respect people, they are not a “subject” they are just normal human being like us, they deserved to be respected and if they refuse to be photographed, let it be, find another person, it’s not the end of the world.

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