11 Mar First Advanced Workshop Completed
A few weeks ago marked the completion of the first Matty Photography advanced workshop. Unlike it’s sister program, the beginner workshop, which has 3 runs under it’s belt, the advanced class just completed it’s maiden voyage. As with everything educational, going through a huge chuck of learning material for the first time with a class is like running the gauntlet. Is the material arranged in the best possible order, is it structured in a way that makes sense with easy to understand vocabulary, how much time should be allotted for each lesson and photo adventure, how many student questions will result from the material and how much time will that eat, etc. There is a lot to estimate into the timing, which will then drive the overall structure and amount of material. As all experienced photographers know, the more you stick your head down the rabbit hole of knowledge, the more you discover it goes on forever. You have to draw the curriculum line somewhere in the sand, decide what takes priority, and ensure that whatever you decide to cover will be properly addressed in class.
For those who are in the dark about my workshops and are into photography, you should definitely out the workshop page by clicking on the ‘workshops’ button at the top of the page. This advanced workshop focuses on off-camera lighting. It teaches students about lighting, how it works, how to trouble shoot it, how to shift and mold qualities of light, etc. As far as the material goes, I think it went great. The photo shoot adventures… well, we will all want more time to shoot. I could set aside a whole day of just shooting and students would want more time. But you gotta draw the line somewhere, make sure concepts are grasped and demonstrated, and then move on. That’s what the courses are for, creating a foundation of understanding, getting the gears greased, and then releasing them off into the wild so that they can begin their growth as a photographer. Sure, the courses will offer some opportunities for good photo taking, but by no means are the in-class shooting adventures designed to revamp someone’s portfolio. After running through all of the shoots, I will be making some tweaks to make them run a little better and a bit more focused/goal oriented.
The photos you see included in this post are some of the photos I snapped as examples to kick-off a lot of the photo shoots. The students get the opportunity to use of lot of my lighting gear. Getting to play with different types of gear will let them get a better idea of what they like, leading to better future gear purchases when they start taking steps into buying more gear. We played with both studio strobe and hot shoe lighting setups. I recruited a couple subjects for us to point our cameras at. Monique and Paul proved to be great models for us as we played with the light around them.
The next stop on the Matty Workshop schedule is down in Longview, WA at the end of this month. I’ll be teaching a private beginner workshop for a group of 8 creatives employed by a health department organization. This will be the first time I’ll have been schedule by an organization to come in and teach a group of their company, so I’m pretty excited about this. Usually a workshop is filled with a hodgepodge of different kinds of shooters with varying goals with their photography, however, this will be a class full of people aiming all at the same common goal with their photography. I will be custom design the shooting adventures for this class so that they will be focused on the team’s future efforts.
