Learning to Photograph

Cora Banek was born in 1981 and has been photographing since 2002. The unique aspect of her craft is that she almost always has the finished, edited image in her mind when she releases the shutter. She opts to shoot infrequently but with great intention and purpose. Cora's visual language is clean and quiet. She likes light, bright images featuring harmonious, subtle, and desaturated colors. She is a borderline perfectionist when it comes to designing her images. Her award-winning photography has been exhibited in international competitions.

Cora's diverse photographic interests include portrait, beauty, fashion, nude, erotic, and floral photography. She knows Photoshop like the back of her hand and routinely optimizes, post-processes, and applies black-and-white conversions to her images. Top quality color management is a part of her daily craft, which she produces consistently for initial exposures, fine-art prints, and everything in between.

She is professionally trained in the cultural sciences and works as a freelance graphic designer and photo editor for exacting photography publications, such as the book you're holding in you're hands. Together with Georg, she writes for magazine and book publishers and develops concepts for educational materials about photography. Her contract work focuses on stylish arrangement and ideal lighting for product photography and the post-processing of the resulting images.

Georg Bankek was born in 1969 and has been photographing since 1984. His style is characterized by close proximity to his subjects, playing with sharpness and blur, and loud, colorful designs with off-kilter perspectives. His attention to detail is common across his portrait, lifestyle, erotic, nude, travel, and detail photography. He sees subjects in everyday scenes that others tend to miss and he excels at capturing these details with a spontaneous and instinctive shooting style, though he prefers to thoroughly prepare portrait shoots.

His contract work as a photographer centers on lifestyle images, everyday scenes, and employee and company profiles. For the past five years, he and Cora have written for photography textbooks and magazines. Georg studied economics and social education. As a management consultant, he pairs his photographic expertise with extensive experience in project management and sales to help corporate clients with their visual representation and professional image design needs.

Including the photography department at the college in Rhein-Main and the photography school at the university in Lüneburg, Artepictura® Academy is the third structured course of photography study that Georg has devised and independenly built. He is earning a teaching degree in Media Management in Wiesbaden and is responsible for the academy at Artepictura-information for which can be found at www.artepictura-akademie.de.