A friend and I decided to try our hand at a bit of character portraiture. Officially the title of the course (conducted by the DCW subsidiary Photology at their studio in the DCW Kent Street store) was "The Artist, The Outlaw and The Magician", using different props and outfits to create different moods.

Truthfully? I'm not sure that that was what it ended up being. It was, however, a most interesting afternoon's work with posing models, and studio quality lighting. Originally we were to have a single model who would be representing the aforementioned three characters. And indeed he was great to work with and I feel bad about not gonging him to be the PESO photo for today (though I'll be putting up the other shots in another gallery when I get the time). Here we see a second model who dropped in to today's shoot mainly just to get some practice. I felt that by 75% luck and 25% design this shot, using a single light and a closed up lens, was the best shot of the day. I've therefore opted to put this one in.

I could have cloned away some of the background that was in beyond our black screen backdrop but I felt that the small amount of detail works better than pure black would have.

Edit from August 2023: Of course, I have yet to put up the other photos from this shoot, heading towards 7 years after it happened. What a surprise. And there will be no further Photology sessions, sadly. As far as I can tell, they hit the wall.

The Kent Street store started out as a company named Foto Riesel, a mid to high end specialist photographic store which had many government contracts, as well as contracts to supply some media companies with camera gear. As happened with oh so many photo shops, the move to digital put a stake through the heart of recurring revenue from film sales and the like. By the mid-2010s the writing was on the wall.

Digital Camera Warehouse (DCW) on the other hand managed to master the art of online sales early, and despite having only one, small physical store in my former stamping ground of Canterbury in Sydney's inner south west had established themselves as a serious player. In 2015 they bought out Foto Riesel and it briefly became "Foto Riesel by DCW", before the old name was dropped and the store in the city became another DCW store. By the end of the decade DCW had physical stores in Melbourne and Brisbane as well, allowing Photology to have bases from which to run courses across three states.

Then... Covid. Within a couple of years DCW had retreated from all of its physical stores save for the Canterbury NSW flagship. Photology is no longer listed on the DCW site. There is still a Facebook page for it which was once quite active but has had no posts since February 2021, and the link to bookings from the Facebook page leads to a 404 on the DCW site.

So that's it. 7 years later, the photography world has once more shrunk by just that little bit. You're probably not that surprised.