Awaken your creative spirit

Let’s face it: curiosity makes masters in any field! It is the curious that always stay hungry and want more. Curious people don’t care too much about being satisfied, as their curiosity drives them to keep learning. However, curiosity is not a natural personality trait that everyone has. In this session, Roberto will share how curiosity can be developed and how to have fun doing it. Roberto will also show you how to harness the power of curiosity to master lighting, posing, composition, and storytelling better than you could ever imagine!

Color is one of the most powerful tools available to photographers. In this class, Lindsay will help you learn to speak the language of color and harness the emotional power of color through your photography! We will dive into color theory including a study of color harmonies, color wheels, additive and subtractive color, and color grading. We’ll cover how color can be utilized in every part of the photographic process, from concept development, set design, and hair/makeup to lighting and post-processing!

Are you someone who values logic, structure, and practicality but often struggles with creativity? Do you wish you could break free from your analytical mindset and tap into your inner creativity? If so, then this class is for you! This class will help you unlock your creative potential by providing you with practical tools and strategies to develop a more creative mindset. You will learn how to: expand your creative thinking and problem-solving skills, develop new perspectives and approaches to your work, overcome creative blocks, and more. Don’t let your logical mindset hold you back from achieving your creative potential. Come to this session and discover how to tap into your inner creativity today!

Technology plays a huge role in picture making. The high tech of cameras is so agile and facile, shooting photos can be construed as…easy. It’s not. Making effective, emotional, storytelling images is as tough to do now as it was in the days of glass plates. In this session, we’ll discuss the origins of inspiration, the drive, and the need to keep making images. It goes way beyond the numbers of pixels to the very heart of the matter: the essential nature of photography as communication, and its extraordinary ability to inform, educate, and emotionally involve our fellow humans.

Learn how to create work that doesn’t look like everything else. Discover how to define, create, and cultivate your style. In this day and age, it is the only thing that will set you apart.

A huge part of our job as working photographers is solving problems in the field. A successful shoot often means drilling through any number of difficulties, from wind, weather, and light to time (or lack thereof), access, personalities, and all manner of unpredictable, obstructive junk that just seems to accumulate during the course of shooting a job. This class will offer insight, humor, history, and strategies for solving problems in the field.

The possibilities for “stylish” black and white have become almost endless in the digital era. This inspirational black and white session will look at a range of monochromatic techniques, from the subtle to the wonderfully crude and edgy. Low-key imagery, working with harsh shadows, the Blossfeldt effect, and LAB inversions will be covered. The session will conclude with suggestions for incorporating stylish black and white in your own work.

Learn to transform technique and powerful software tools in Photoshop and Lightroom into a traditional craft discipline in which the tools, the created object, and the maker become inseparable. This session addresses how to realize your creative intent employing basic to intermediate tools and integrating methods with the unique sensibilities of the mind and heart of the photographer.

We all know “the usual” modifiers like softboxes, umbrellas, and the beauty dish. But what about a Fresnel, a flashlight, LED tubes, or even lasers? In this session, Lindsay will introduce you to some unusual lights and modifiers that will ignite your creativity and help you think outside the box of what you can achieve with light.

Learn to think like a filmmaker by infusing your still photography with cinematic flare. In this class you’ll learn to incorporate a range of cinematic techniques and visual sensibilities that can help your work be more evocative and tell compelling visual stories. Join Chris to explore how filmmakers help define their visual tastes and how you can use it in your still images, including three-point lighting (the way they do it in the movies), motivated lighting, cinematic color theory, and other in-camera techniques to give your images that “movie magic.” Bring home the drama, mystery, and flavor of the movies, one frame at a time.

While Nick is known for his bold, experimental images that are made using in-camera effects, he is equally known for the unconventional manner in which he conducts his shoots: working almost exclusively alone, and with minimal gear. In this session, Nick will discuss his journey from art school to shooting weddings, to working out of a makeshift basement studio, to working with some of the biggest artists and clients in the world.

What makes a good photograph and/or a good photographer? This session explores the importance of innate and developed talent and how necessary it is to produce consistently good imagery.

This detailed session will approach composition as an instance of open-ended two-dimensional design. Photographic examples will start with simple shapes, such as lines and circles, and proceed through patterns and repetitions, and onward to spirals, fractals, and abstractions. Suggested exercises will tie these concepts to your own creative practice.

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera.”

—Dorothea Lange

This session teaches how to employ the eye and the mind and incorporate both perception and concept into image-making. Learn to see how a camera sees, discover the seeds of your unique vision, and explore visual expression in photography through inspiring examples drawn from contemporary and historic photographers.

Join Scott as he shares his top five photo locations in each of seven places around the globe that present the best opportunities for stunning travel photography. Scott discusses gear, shooting tips, and more as he presents beautiful work from Paris, Venice, Tuscany, New York City, and more.

Posing is a topic of fear for most people. We feel vulnerable in front of our subjects if we don’t know what to do next or how to handle a subject who appears very stiff during the shoot. In this class, Roberto will share his invaluable techniques for using the body’s natural movements for our photographic advantage. Don’t fight the body; use it naturally. This class is a must for those who want to feel in control of posing forever.

The camera on your iPhone is more than just a “backup” camera in case your primary camera fails. In fact, there are things that your iPhone camera does better than your mirrorless or DSLR camera! Join Scott as he shows you these features and explains how, by using both cameras together, you’ll have a much more powerful set of tools to help you achieve your vision.

In an age of AI and a heavy reliance on filters and Photoshop to create or modify photographs, Nick Fancher has leaned into the use of in-camera effects in his portrait photography. In this session, Nick will break down his process from how he executes his signature techniques to when and why he selects a certain one to communicate something about his subject.

This session is about embracing feelings of discomfort to promote creative growth. Ibarionex will discuss how inexperience, mistakes, and challenges are essential to discovering one’s personal approach and style.

Learn how to move from making those all-too-common mistakes to creating masterful and beautiful portraits. In this session, I will show you my mistakes and how I resolved them so that you can do the same.