Yassou, Bonjour or Hello???
The reason for the multiple international greetings is that I’m a little disoriented right now with jet lag – Where in the world am I? Last night we returned back home to Ottawa after being away for nearly a month, while on a photography trip to France and also conducting a photo workshop in Greece. What an incredible trip! Now, I have to pay the piper and spend some time in the office catching up with unglamourous side of photography.
Yesterday evening was the last classroom session for this year’s Ottawa Spring Photography Workshop. It’s always great to see the improvement in the participant’s photography. And to think that it only takes a couple of weeks of classroom instruction and photography on the weekend field trips to achieve this. I am constantly being amazed at the stunning pictures that everyone creates on the workshops and how their photography is taken to a new level of creativity and vision. Congratulations to all of the students for creating another successful workshop – Thanks!!!
I would have never thought that in Ottawa on May 1st that the tulip blossoms would have peaked, but that’s what has happened this year. Depending where in the world you live, this might either be late for the peak or early for you. For Ottawa it’s at least 2 weeks early, by the middle of the month when they should normally be peaking and Ottawa celebrates with it’s Tulip Festival, all of the tulips will be gone.
The classes for the spring photo workshop aren’t scheduled to start until this coming Wednesday evening and the first field trips until next weekend. In order to make sure that we didn’t miss out on the tulips, we added an extra field trip day to the workshop. The above photo was taken this morning at the tulip beds in Commissioners Park at Dow’s Lake on our bonus field trip. So if you live in Ottawa and you don’t want to miss out on the spring blossoms, get out this week with your camera!
Greece Photography Workshop
This year’s workshop to Greece is now fully booked. Send me an email if you want to be placed on the wait list for this trip, or if you would like to have your name added to our mailing list for any of the other upcoming workshops. For 2011 it looks like Newfoundland will be one of the workshop/tour destinations, Dale Wilson and I will be the instructors on this trip.
As unusually cold weather grips most of the US, the UK and parts of Europe with record cold temperatures and snow, here in Ottawa we are just having a normal winter. Ottawa has several months of non stop frigidly cold freezing weather and snow, and rather than complain about it (well sometimes we do) we celebrate it! Every February we have a winter festival called Winterlude. There’s skating on the Rideau Canal (the world’s largest outdoor rink), ice and snow sculpture competitions and many other winter activities. I’ve had several requests for a winter photo workshop, so I thought this would be the perfect time.
Both Winter and Winterlude provide us with lots of photo opportunities, there are the preconceived obvious shots and then there are the found unexpected photos. For one weekend in February join me on this discovery. Details of the workshop are posted HERE
In May 2010, I’ll be returning to Greece to conduct another photography workshop on the islands of Mykonos and Santorini and a couple of days on the mainland in Athens. This will be the 4th time that I’ve gone to Greece and I have to tell you that I just love this place! It’s one of the top places in the world which I would consider to be a photographer’s dream come true. On the workshop we’ll be slowing down and spending lots of time exploring and photographing the locations and towns. Here’s the web site with further information about this trip.
Starting this fall I will be teaching several customized courses in Photoshop. These workshops will consist of either private or small group classes and will be taught at the various skill levels of Photoshop. Ottawa Photoshop Classes
Last evening was the final classroom session of the Fall Ottawa Photography Workshop. We had great shooting conditions on the field trips for both of the weekends despite the ominous weather forecasts that had been predicting rain. And like this past spring and summer, it was also colder than normal this fall. I’ve posted a small photo gallery with 15 of pictures that I took on the workshop here.
During the winter months I will be teaching classes on Photoshop, details of these workshops will be posted to my web site this coming weekend. The next photography workshop in Ottawa will be this spring in May 2010.
Desert Landscape at Sunrise - Richersveld, South Africa
Over this past summer I conducted a number of private one on one photography classes in Ottawa. Ranging from beginners learning the technical skills on how to properly use their camera controls (not on Auto or Program) to full day outings with some very advanced and very experienced photographers wanting to improve their creative vision. I also taught several sessions of post-processing images with Photoshop as well as HDR images in Photomatix.
Next week I’ll be in London for a presentation “The Creative Image Making Process” for the London Camera Club. Followed by a 2 day workshop with outings around the city and classroom sessions for critiquing and Photoshop instruction. At the end of September the Fall Ottawa Photography Workshop begins. With the weather that we’ve had this summer, this year’s fall colours should be spectacular!
Later in the fall and also during the winter months I’m planning to hold small group (2 to 3 people) classes on Photoshop and HDR using Photomatix. What I’ve learned from teaching Photoshop is that it’s best taught targeting each student’s needs rather than trying to teach a large group of people everything that the program can do.
It’s been 9 years since I last conducted a photo workshop in my hometown of Ottawa. Over all those years, people have been asking when am I going to do another one? The problem has been that my two favourite times of year to photograph in Ottawa and also hold a workshop are in the spring and fall and I haven’t been in Ottawa at those times of year for a long time. Well this year I’m going to be in Ottawa during May as I’m trying to finish all the post processing of everything that I’ve already shot to date. So I thought this would be the perfect time to hold a workshop in Ottawa again, details of the workshop can be found here.
