Let’s talk about photo workshops. On-location, travel workshops have always appealed to me, particularly when thinking about traveling to an unfamiliar place on my own. But I have always had a love-hate relationship with them. I love going out with other photographers, sharing in the discovery of a new place and enjoying the camaraderie of each other’s company, and maybe picking up a few new tips along the way. But I hate being told where to stand, what to photograph, or how to do it. Photography, like other art forms, is mostly a solitary pursuit and I’m more interested in photographing what speaks to me than in re-creating someone else’s vision of how to interpret a place.
Pre-pandemic, I might have gone to a workshop every two or three years. But in the last year, I’ve been to four different travel workshops. Two of the workshops were in Death Valley, one took place over a weekend in Chicago, and the fourth was a break in the middle of a road trip I made through parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona. As I’ve begun to think about where to travel next year, I’ve found myself looking back at what I gained, and what I didn’t, from these four workshops.
Last fall, I joined Eddie Soloway at an alumni get together in Boulder, Utah, to explore parts of Grand Escalante Staircase National Monument. Eddie’s been putting these together for years to bring together folks that have taken one of his more formal workshops. These aren’t workshops per se. Participants go out on their own each day, then come together in the afternoons and evenings to share stories and experiences. Eddie will give a presentation or lead a discussion, but the focus is really on connection and creativity.
Having never been to Grand Escalante before, and being mostly on my own, I was more frustrated than excited by the images I was making. Too often I pulled myself away from a subject too soon because there was something else I had seen or heard about just down the road. But when I remembered to slow down and be present, I was able to make a few images that mattered to me. I recall one afternoon, walking along a narrow mud-filled creek below a red rock cliff under a canopy of golden cottonwoods, no sound but the rustle of leaves and crunch of my boots. As I wandered through the forest, I just looked and listened; camera tucked away in my pack. And it was then that I began to see. (You can see what I saw over here.)
Last December I went to Death Valley for a Muench Photo Workshop. I had long-been lured by Muench’s glossy presentations of photogenic locations around the world and the glowing prose embroidering its itineraries. And the Muench name still has magic for anyone like me who began their photographic journey back in the ’70s. So I signed up to go to Death Valley with them last December, even though another Death Valley workshop I had planned to attend – put on by the folks at Out of Chicago – had been cancelled and rescheduled to January, a month after I was signing up to be there with Muench. (I assumed one or the other would probably get cancelled again … and if not, it would be easy enough to reschedule one of the two. But procrastination won out, the cancellation deadlines passed, and there I was back in Death Valley again in January.) You can see some of the images I made at these workshops over here.
I don’t regret going to the same location twice. Every workshop operator is different. Some, like Out of Chicago, tend to focus on creative vision. Others, like Muench, spend more time discussing technical details. Regardless of their differences in approach, both workshops put us in the right place at the right time to capture the right light, which is one of the main things I hope a workshop will deliver.
Out of Chicago brought together 20 well-known photographers and 100 guests, who were divided into groups of 10 that went out twice a day around sunrise and sunset to shoot with one or two of the pros. Out of Chicago tends to attract passionate photographers who are accomplished in their own right, and spending time with my fellow participants was just as rewarding as the time spent with the pros. And the collection of pros they attract is amazing. Among other adventures, we climbed around 20 Mule Team Canyon with William Neill and Michael Frye, wandered into Badwater Basin with Colleen Miniuk and Michael Gordon, and were entertained by John Barclay and Cole Thompson at Zabriskie Point. The outings were kind of like speed dating. You get a lot of short opportunities to shoot and get acquainted with some fantastic pros, and perhaps gain a few kernels of knowledge and inspiration from the encounter.
Muench is a more typical small group tour, and seems geared as much to the casual photographer as the serious amateur. We had just 6 photographers and 3 pros on the trip (a somewhat atypical ratio – 2 guests had cancelled at the last minute and we had an extra pro who was auditioning for a permanent gig with the company). With a small group and two vehicles, Muench had more flexibility to chuck plans and chase the light. And while logistics kept Out of Chicago to locations relatively close to Furnace Creek, Muench got us down to the Ibex Dunes at sunset and made an unscheduled trip to shoot the Joshua Trees up at Lee Flat when some promising weather rolled in. Both were enchanting locations I had not been to before, and that introduction led me to return to Lee Flat the following month on my way to join the Out of Chicago conference.
But, at bottom, it’s not where you go or who you’re with. What you learn – whether at a workshop or on your own – depends more on how you approach the subject than on what someone else tells you to see. At both workshops, I enjoyed the opportunity to talk photography with the pros and other participants, yet was still able to spend most of the time in the field exploring my own vision. And I think I came away with images that were uniquely my own, even if made at a place and time selected by someone else. A workshop can open your eyes to new locations and ideas, but that is just a springboard to creativity. It is up to you to bring those lessons into your own work and make them part of your practice.
A few months ago I joined a much different kind of workshop with Angie McMonigal, shooting architectural abstracts in an urban environment. I had made a lot of abstract images and photographed a lot of buildings before, but I hadn't really put the two together all that often, and certainly not with any kind of intention. I had seen a couple of Angie’s presentations at Out of Chicago on-line events, and thought her workshop would be a good opportunity to kickstart me in a new direction, so I signed up for her weekend workshop in Chicago. It had been awhile since I’d been there, and I was hoping seeing it with fresh eyes in the company of a native Chicagoan would help break me out of my box. Check out my gallery and decide for yourself if I succeeded. (You can also see my more typical street and travel images from the trip over here.)
This was more photowalk then workshop. We visited over 30 locations in three days, some for an hour or two, some for just 10 or 15 minutes. At each location, Angie would whip out her iPad and quickly scroll through some images she had made, then we would spread out and begin to shoot. No one looking over your shoulder, no daily image reviews or classroom breaks. This was a fast-paced just-get-out-and-shoot kind of workshop. While I am often a fan of going out without a preconceived notion of what to shoot, there are also times to narrow and focus your vision. Going out every day, all day, looking at architecture and being hyper-attentive to shape, line, color, light and form really helped me start to see the urban environment in a new way.
In other news …
If you haven’t poked around my website in a while you might notice a few changes around here. I’ve been slowly re-organizing and redesigning the website (again). I’m trying to do a better job of curating and organizing the galleries, and also adding a few design tweaks here and there.
The Places gallery (as well as the short-lived Road Trips gallery I wrote about last time) has been replaced with two new collection sets – Near (for images made closer to home) and Far (for images made … well you get it.) I’ve also finally gotten around to posting some pre-pandemic images I made in Oaxaca and Cambodia, in addition to adding galleries of more recent work. And I’ve brought back the Out & About gallery, with the intention of refreshing it with new images (and removing some old ones) every month with more recent work. At the same time, I’ve begun culling some of the older galleries to provide a smaller and more curated and cohesive set of images. It’s slow going (it’s hard to kill your babies) and as of this writing I’ve only made it through a few galleries. But I’m committed to getting this project done by the end of the year. Or maybe next spring. Really.
On the design front, I recently discovered a couple of third-party plug-ins that fix two of the biggest things I’ve found missing in Squarespace. The first randomizes gallery images so they appear in a different order every time you load them, and the second enables masonry layouts so horizontal and vertical images look better when presented next to one another in image galleries. Click around a few of the galleries on my website and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The plug-ins only cost $19 each and were well worth it to me. Check them out if you’ve been looking for a similar solution.
Finally, I’ll close by sharing that a few of my images recently won awards in a couple juried competitions:
These three images were accepted in the Sacramento Fine Arts Center’s Watery Wonders exhibition in June, and the black and white shot (from Cascade Creek in Yosemite) won Best of Show.
And these two were accepted for the Found Objects exhibition at PhotoPlace gallery in Middlebury, Vermont, where the image of the bike and Lake Superior (shot in Duluth, Minnesota) received an honorable mention.
Thanks for sticking with me to the end. See you next time.