I’ll be launching a new class in June in conjunction with KelbyOne. It’s called The Complete Photographer, and it’s nearly sold out! For a relentless, nonstop week, we drive towards becoming the title of the class: The Complete Photographer.
We all stay at the same lovely hotel, so it will be pictures, critiques, and constant analysis and storytelling, breakfast, lunch and dinner. We’ll have problems to be solved. The locations will be wonderful, and complicated. The ongoing mission of the week is to move the needle, not just a notch, but to a whole new level. My goal for anyone in the class is to go home feeling confident of pulling off a job and returning successful results when, at first perusal, you show up and realize there ain’t a picture within miles of where you are. You succeed, even, as they say, “you got one eye shut and a bug in the other.”
There’s lots of photo education out there. You can pick up pieces of valuable info from all over the internet. You can train-up in a smorgasbord of skills, from lighting to post-production, from i-Phone shooting to the darkly mysterious paths of AI. But, this class is different. It will have serious intent, and equally serious evaluation of the day-to-day results. The actors, models and subjects will range from real -world folks to beautiful talent. It will have assignments with deadlines. The intent of photographing in the field will not be random.
Coming up as a young photog, I wanted/needed to work so badly that I didn’t want to confront any situation I felt I could not handle as a photographer. Not to say there were things I took that I shouldn’t have, or assignments I needed to shoot better. But I never felt like a job was so accelerated that I couldn’t see my way to managing it. Add that to a healthy capacity to convince myself of just about anything, as in, “Yeah, I can figure this out,” and you got a snapshot of my photo brain. I can do it, give me the work.
Hence I’ve had the kitchen sink of assigning thrown at me over time. Celebrities, Olympics, corporate, advertising, fashion, concept work, industrial, portraiture, long form involving months in the field style of coverages for Nat Geo, five minute famous people covers for Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated, lighting the world’s largest telescopes, and simple one light portraits that tell a powerful story.
There’s been simple, lovely jobs with small budgets and wonderful results. There’s been tremendously pressurized jobs with six figure budgets and high expectation. And everything in between.
One constant? The mission of the photographer remains the same. Tell a good story. Use your toolbox of skills, and the electric combination of your eye, mind, and heart. Ramp up your ability to think your way into powerful visuals that live both inside and outside the box. Learn to adapt, and develop an ability to improvise, turn on a dime and rescue a job that, on the face of it, is very likely to go down the drain.
We’ll talk business and survival skills. We’ll spin stories and look at the work of those who have gone before, formidable archives that constitute the shoulders upon which we all stand. We’ll risk and try things out of the ordinary. It’s a wonderful and soul cleansing experience to wander the streets of just about anywhere, looking for pictures in the lovely light of the late afternoon. It’s entirely another to hone the skills needed to show up in the blaze of the noonday sun and tame that beast. Or produce an art director’s eloquent, but outlandish, wishes while bobbing in a sea of misfortune, lack of time, and unrealistic expectations.
We’re talking, really, about confidence. Which is a huge part of the photographic equation. And this week is designed to give you just that.
Work a situation. Deliver a result. Find another gear and dig in. The grit and glue of a photographic career.
Transforming an ordinary, uninspirational room and coming away with this….
Or be shown this…
And render this, which is a situation conforming to the client’s image of itself, but in fact, has no basis in reality.
Locations, studios, models all provided. Ditto strobe gear, all you can possibly want. A week of stories, laughter, and immersion. Register here to join us! The Complete Photographer.
More tk…
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