Springtime often inspires photographers to capture the vibrant colors of blooming wildflowers. While the allure of colorful floral photography is undeniable, there’s a unique beauty in exploring wildflowers through the lens of black and white. By stripping away color, you can focus on the intricate textures, shapes, and forms of these delicate subjects, revealing a different dimension of their character.

Coming to you from Jason Friend Photography, this insightful video explores the art of photographing wildflowers in black and white. Friend takes you on a journey into a local woodland, demonstrating his approach to capturing the essence of these natural wonders. He emphasizes the importance of considering textures and forms when composing black and white images, as opposed to the usual focus on color palettes. This shift in perspective allows you to appreciate the subtle details and unique characteristics of each flower, creating images with depth and visual interest.

He demonstrates a clever technique for creating a striking black background using a single flash, allowing the wildflowers to stand out as the focal point of each composition. By carefully controlling the lighting and aperture settings, he achieves a dramatic contrast that accentuates the textures and details of the flowers. 

This video serves as a valuable reminder that stepping outside of conventional approaches can lead to unusual and intriguing results. Black and white wildflower photography offers a unique opportunity to explore the intricate beauty of nature in a new light. By focusing on textures, shapes, and forms, you can create images that evoke a sense of timelessness and elegance. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Friend.
 

Before I express my own opinion, I will lay my cards on the table, I run workshops and have done so for over twenty years. I have led workshops for the Nikon School and a few years ago now, ran the official LEE Filters workshops. I currently run my own one-to-one and small group workshops, from a single day to ten days in length, both in the UK, Europe and North America.

So, I am of course, biased. Obviously, I think my workshops are worth it, but on listening to some of my clients (they are not just my clients, they attend workshops led my many other photographers and companies as well), I do hear of some horror stories.

So what is a workshop, as opposed to a photographic tour? On a photographic tour you can expect to be taken to some great locations and then pretty much left to get on with whatever you want to shoot with little or indeed, no input from the tour leader. The leader may well be an expert on the region or locality but not necessarily a top photographer. If this is what you want from a trip this is ideal, and of course there is something to be said about being left to get on with image taking with no one standing over your shoulder waiting to pounce at the slightest mistake.

A workshop should be far more than just a tour of locations. In my view, there should be an educational element to the trip. This could be in the form of evening lectures about technique and post-production or on location, hands-on, one to one tuition. Simple guidance in the field, a gentle prod in the right direction, creative ideas that can be applied there and then are all part of an evolving learning process.

Post-workshop follow-ups such as written critiques of the client’s favourite images from a trip have proved popular as has continuing long-term contact for general advice and guidance. This is support and education, the basis of any workshop.

But here is what I do not understand. Photographers who shoot their own images on a workshop, and there’s plenty of them, just look at any social media platform. If they are shooting their own work, who is keeping an eye on the clients? Who is checking that they are ok and that they are getting ‘the’ shot? 

As a working professional, I know that if I am concentrating on getting an image, I do not have time for anyone else, I am blinkered and focussed, I just want to get the best possible image I can and I become totally absorbed in the moment. It is why I rarely shoot on a workshop. I do shoot every now and then, but this is to show the clients how I see the view, what technique I have applied and hopefully inspire the them.

I recently heard a story from a client who attended a very expensive overseas workshop. Having set her tripod and camera up for what she thought was a great shot, the workshop leader then moved them so that he could take his version of the same image. I have heard numerous stories of photographers leaving their group to go and shoot their own images, offering no input to any form of creative technique.

All workshops and tours will have their own unique parameters. What is and isn’t included? Location transport, accommodation, meals, tuition, loan of kit etc. Some workshops and tours will aim to keep the group together, sharing meal times with the whole group, including the tutors. Others will provide the accommodation but find the tutors staying somewhere completely different and in some cases you have to sort accommodation and meals yourself and are merely given a location at which to meet at a specified time.

Booking a tour or workshop can be a minefield and you need to do your research well and decide what you want to get out of a trip. A recommendation is probably the best starting point. Speak to someone who has been away with a particular tutor, leader, or company. 

But be warned. Even well-known photographic companies that advertise with phrases such as ‘as featured in’  a certain national newspaper are not all they are cracked up to be. Do your research and even track down and speak to the tutor who is leading the trip. Find out as much as you can and decide, do you want a photographic tour or do you want tuition and guidance on a photographic workshop?

I believe photographic workshops are worth it, just choose wisely, and don’t be afraid to get in touch and ask how the course will work for you.

Check our guide to the best camera for beginners.

One night in 2005, during one of his epic group road trips across America, the photographer Ryan McGinley trained his camera on a naked man and woman on a van roof in California. “We were looking at shooting stars and I was trying to do some long exposures to get something cool,” says McGinley, “but I didn’t have the technical capabilities so I just did a point-and-shoot.”

The attempt to capture the stars may have failed, but the photograph itself, suggesting the tenderness and vulnerability of lovers against the vast emptiness of space, did not. After the trip, McGinley put together a zine of recent images to share with friends and people he knew, including Elton John, who had developed an interest in the photographer’s work. “Elton said: ‘Thank you’, then five minutes later he gave it back to me. I was like: ‘What?’” McGinley recalls, laughing. “It turns out he thought the zine was a catalogue to buy photos. That photo [of the night sky] was circled and he was like: ‘I want this one.’”

View image in fullscreen

It’s one of many works by McGinley that the musician, who has been collecting photography since the early 1990s, has acquired over the years. They first met in 2003 when McGinley, then one of the hottest young artists in New York, known for documenting the joyous excesses of the city’s gay scene, had a solo exhibition at the Whitney entitled The Kids Are Alright. The show lit a fuse under McGinley’s career and won him his most deep-pocketed fan. “Elton just came to the show and looked around, and said: ‘I’ll take that, that, that and that.’”

They’ve remained friends ever since. As well as buying his works, allowing McGinley to undertake more ambitious projects, Elton commissioned him to shoot the cover for his 2006 album, The Captain & the Kid, and offered support when McGinley went sober nearly 13 years ago. Now, Elton and his husband, David Furnish, are including six of McGinley’s works in a new exhibition of their vast photography collection, Fragile Beauty, which opens this month at London’s V&A.

View image in fullscreen

Of the six photographs, all taken between 1999 and 2005, perhaps the most striking shows McGinley and his then boyfriend having sex in his East Village bedroom, watched over by scores of Polaroid portraits. Its extraordinary candidness is typical of the photographer’s work, distinguished by a deep and often playful intimacy with his subjects.

In the corner hangs a string of rosary beads, a reminder of McGinley’s religious upbringing in New Jersey, where he was the youngest of eight in a conservative Catholic family. Moving to New York to study at Parsons School of Design in the mid-90s was a liberation for the artist, who came out as gay the year before Having Sex (Polaroids) was taken, and much of his early work was about “discovering my queerness”, he says.

View image in fullscreen

After the Whitney show in 2003, McGinley began to move beyond the streets of New York. “I just knew that I had to pivot or else I’d be a one-trick pony,” he says. His response was to organise month-long road trips across America with friends, usually in groups of 10, so that he could photograph bodies in nature. Dakota (Hair), which features in the V&A exhibition, was taken on the first of these trips: it shows a woman in the back of a pickup truck sipping from a cup while the wind whips at her hair. “We never made it out of New Jersey when I was younger,” says McGinley, “so being in California, out in the desert, it felt as if I was in Kerouac’s On the Road. It was such a special time.”

McGinley still does road trips, but on a less epic scale: he might go to Colorado or California for a couple of weeks to zero in on a particular landscape element – rocks or trees covered in Spanish moss or sand. (He photographed Brad Pitt in various US national parks for a GQ cover feature in 2017.) Over the past decade, in contrast to the raw spontaneity of his early work, McGinley has been doing more composed studio portraits, photographing artists and musicians for commercial and editorial, as well as fine-art projects. A monograph of his studio work, entitled Yearbook, will be published by Rizzoli later this year.

View image in fullscreen

Now 46, McGinley remains fascinated by young people. As well as documenting youthful bodies, he offers apprenticeships and guidance to up-and-coming photographers – he mentions Quil Lemons, Sandy Kim and Marie Tomanova as three current favourites. For an artist who thrives off youthful energy, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship (and one that mirrors his own with Elton John). “I learn more from the kids now than I did when I was young,” he says. “I always feel like, when someone’s asking me for advice, I’m getting as much information from them – about what their thoughts are politically, or what’s new that I might not be up on, or just where the energy’s at – I always want to be where the energy’s at.”

• Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection is at the V&A, London SW7, 18 May–5 January 2025

#lee-outstream-wrap {
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
max-width: 800px;
margin: 0 auto;
display: none;
position: relative;
}
#lee-outstream-wrap .ima-controls-div { z-index: 99; }
#lee-outstream-wrap .lee-outstream-video {
position: relative;
padding-bottom: 56.25%;
height: 0;
}
#lee-outstream-wrap .lee-outstream-video video {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
z-index:1;
}
#lee-outstream-close {
display: none;
position: absolute;
cursor: pointer;
top: -25px;
left: -25px;
padding: 10px;
overflow: hidden;
background-color: #000;
border-radius: 20px;
color: #fff;
z-index: 99;
line-height: 0;
box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 0px 0px 5px 0px;
}
#lee-outstream-close:hover { color: rgba(255,255,255,.8); }
#lee-outstream-wrap.sticky {
position: fixed;
bottom:0;
right:0;
width: 400px;
z-index: 1000;
height: auto;
box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 0px 0px 10px 0px;
}
#lee-outstream-wrap.sticky #lee-outstream-close{ display: block; }
@media (max-width: 767px){
#lee-outstream-wrap.sticky { width: 60%; }
}

Ming Smith photographed the four boys on their backdoor rafts on a pond in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1972. She called the unlikely urban Huck Finn scene Setting Out to Sea, since that’s where one or two of the friends seemed to be aiming for, at least in their heads.

Smith was developing big plans of her own at that time. Detroit-born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, she had arrived in New York a year earlier after graduating from Howard University. Her first published pictures appeared in the inaugural, renowned Black Photographers Annual in 1973. The annual, with an introduction by Toni Morrison, featured the work of artists from the Kamoinge Workshop in Harlem, which was a prime mover in the Black Arts movement. Smith had become the first female member of that group. Her biography in the annual read: “New York amateur photographer Ming Smith has been taking pictures for less than a year. She is a self-taught photographer, who was first influenced by her father. ‘My photographs,’ she says, ‘attempt to open the passageway to my understanding of myself.’”

Part of that understanding came from wandering the Lower West Side neighbourhood in which she lived, “following the light”, as she describes it, looking for the places, as here, in which it collected and came alive. Her biography wasn’t quite accurate; she had been taking pictures with her dad since she was a girl; at Howard she photographed a young Cassius Clay and went on to take celebrated portraits of everyone from her friend Grace Jones to James Baldwin and Nina Simone. In 1979, she was the first Black female photographer to have work bought by the Museum of Modern Art (an accolade she likened to “winning an Oscar and no one knowing”). This picture is included in a retrospective of Smith’s work, On the Road, at the Nicola Vasell gallery in New York.

• Ming Smith: On the Road is at the Nicola Vassell gallery, New York, until 15 June