Another Great, Free, Educational, Fun Webinar

May 03, 2011

Just Another Working Joe

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Another Great, Free, Educational, Fun Webinar

The beginnings of a photographer are often humbling. The middle years are a time of exploration and growth. The latter years are time of reflection.

Well as many of you who follow our blog postings know, we watch a lot of webinars put on by CreativeLive. Just look back at the ones we did Jasmine Star and Bambi Cantrell. This webinar was entitled: The Foundations of a Working Photographer” and it was presented by just that, a photographer who works--Zack Arias.

Zack did a previous webinar, but we were unable to watch it, so this was his second showing on CreativeLive. One of the things I like about his approach to this workshop was that he made it personal. He got through to Dawn and I as we watched. He spoke calmly and deliberately as if he had “been there and done that.” That was the point I think. He wasn’t so much telling us about his journey as a photographer, he was taking us with him as he re-traveled it.

He told us of his humble beginning as a photographer needing to feed his family. And about his divorce and second marriage. And about his children. He took us with him as he spoke about getting paying shoots, and getting a business manager who got him even more shoots and more profitable shoots. Along the journey we got to meat his wife Meg and his young son Hawk.

Being a photographer is not just about saying “cheese” and snapping the shutter, and it is also not just being able to see the shot before you ever set it up. It is about the journey from start to finish, the sum of the total really does add up to more then the sum of the pieces, and it is important how you interact with and arrange those pieces.

The webinar had it’s structure and it went like this:

Day one was manly about technical things;

Bullet Camera

Bullet Exposure

Bullet Lens

Bullet Meter

Bullet Reciprocals

Day two as manly about understanding what you see and how you interact:

Bullet Seeing the light

Bullet Interacting with the model

Bullet Not being limited by your limitations

Bullet Creativity

Day 3 was about finding the right mix of things:

Bullet Courage to Persevere

Bullet Business

Bullet Web Site Concepts

Bullet Personal and family thoughts

As with the previous workshop, I connected my laptop to our big screen TV so that we could watch in comfort. Dawn snapped this photo of me watching and taking notes (copious amounts) on a second laptop set up with Twitter and the Chat room.

Some of my favorite quotes from the three days were:

“Photography calls many, but chooses few"

"You will always have self doubt"

“Go past the fear and get the job done

"Feel your composition"

And this is Zack’s favorite quote:

“The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.” - Edward Weston

Dawn and I are on our own personal and shared journey with photography. It is comforting to know that others have gone before us down the same path and have encountered “situations” along the way. It gives us the courage to continue on. I’ll let you know about the “Kodak Moments” as we get to them.

Keywords: education