Looking back at 2009 Workshops

Last year was quite an adventure in this workshop world. Even though every time we turned around someone was pointing out the world economic issues, we discovered there is a strong desire by photographers to be involved in improving their photography. There was quite a variety of classes offered, from real camera basics, to multiple workshops with a theme attached. The most rewarding aspect of teaching these was that the people all worked extremely hard, and appeared to have a lot of fun doing it. The workshop atmosphere seemed to grow as the year progressed, and the pressure was put on to keep all of the students busy. We started the year holding a workshop on shutter speeds and aperture. With the vast majority of cameras being automatic, it is very easy for photographers to skip merrily along and not really grasp what those two controls actually do. We then moved onto a series of workshops discussing the emotions of color. Again this was because color is taken for granted today. This is a workshop I have taught at various levels over the years, and the result is always the same. "The world looks totally different to me now". All of this led to a workshop where the students could put all of these things together when we went to Northern State Hospital to work on the "Abscence of Light". More about how that evolved into something very intense in a later entry here. The moral of last year's experience is that "Alternative Focus" has been formed in order to offer more and diverse workshops. There will be a concerted effort to get the word out to a larger area which will lead to more opportunities and additional instructors with more ideas. It should be a wildly exciting year, so be sure to check this blog often to see what else is brewing. There are a lot of ideas for 2010, and you don't want to miss out.