Workshop Recap

On November 1st, Kim Jarman and I held our second beginner workshop — followed by our first intermediate workshop — at Kim’s studio in Mesa. We had 12 people for the beginner class, which really is the perfect amount for our format. I don’t think we will ever have more than 15 people, so that we can keep in the portion of helping each attendee with the fundamentals. The goal of our workshop is to teach the fundamentals of photography — basically how to take their cameras off of the automatic settings and practice shooting manually, allowing them to have more creativity in their photographs. We teach the basics of understanding light, aperture, shutter speed and ISO, and how they relate when shooting manually, as well as provide some hands-on lessons and examples, and share which lenses will provide the most bang for their buck as far as output of image quality goes. We also shared several shots that Kim and I have taken with the exact settings, lenses, time of day, etc., and provided explanation as to how we achieved the shot, something that the last workshop had specifically requested more of, and several commented this time around that those examples were very helpful. Nearly everyone said they learned quite a bit and got something (or a great deal) from the class, which is what we hoped for!

Here are some images from the day. A very special thank you to Gisele Holloway for coming to take some photos for us!

Here is the group!

In the afternoon, we held our intermediate workshop, which was the perfect size with 7 attendees. This really allowed us to spend some time with each of them, as well as for everyone to get in close and get some shots of their own of the models. The goal of the intermediate workshop was to go much more in-depth, build upon all the fundamentals by applying them in action, and really speak to the specific things that the attendees wanted to learn (posing suggestions, working with clients or putting people at ease, incorporating more creativity into shooting and understanding light better.) This workshop was VERY hands-on, with live models and an in-depth post-processing lesson in Adobe Lightroom. After our live shoot, we processed the images and then shared everyone’s work – which was very cool to see what everyone captured during the day. Everyone did so great!! The feedback Kim and I have received has been astounding and we are so thrilled that everyone learned so much. Here is an email I received from Jenny a day later, who took our beginner workshop last July and attended the intermediate workshop this time:

“Thank you so much for putting on the intermediate workshop with Kim! I had so much fun and definitely learned a lot. It was so great to watch you and Kim work with clients and to see how you determined great places to shoot. I feel like my photography skills have already improved just by knowing more about how to look for good light and how to compose interesting photos. The Lightroom portion of the workshop was extremely helpful! Thank you for taking the time to sit with each of us individually to edit some of our images. This was extremely helpful and now I know so much more about Lightroom that I can apply to other photos I’ve taken. It was definitely encouraging to see others photos at the workshop and to learn from the way they take photographs and the way they edit them. Thank you again for being so willing to share your photography knowledge and expertise!”

Here is a how our afternoon progressed. After about 1-1/2 hours of class time, we went outside to shoot!

We started with our toddler model Noah, who has done some modeling in the past, so he definitely loved the camera.

Here is a shot that Lizzie got of me working with Noah.

And one of the resulting shots…

Then we photographed our family – clients and friends of mine. I was loving how their reds and blacks were popping against this wall.

Little Paulo was a good example for the class how many toddlers are very shy in the beginning. But like most, he also warmed up quickly.

Bianca however, loves the camera!

Then we did some lessons in “panning” the camera to capture motion. In this case, the kids running back and forth. Here are a couple shots I nabbed.

Lastly, we finished off with our adorable, married couple Christa and Donald. We had a little more time with them simply because they were last and we took advantage of the setting sun. Here are some of my favs from this little “mini session.”

I loved the shadow on the wall from the tree!

Practicing with backlighting and sun flare.

Thank you, thank you to everyone who attended both workshops!!