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Friday, February 7, 2014

Workshops

The web is, it sometimes seems, simply littered with people offering workshops on photography.

I occasionally think to myself "I write an incredibly unpopular blog, I know some stuff about photography, should I do workshops?" and then I start mulling over what on earth I would say.

There's plenty of really smart knowledgeable folks out there doing technical workshops. You wanna know how to light people? There's probably 100 people out there offering really excellent workshops. Also probably 1000 more offering terrible ones, but that's beside the point. The world is full of crap.

There's a whole bunch of dudes (why is it always dudes, anyways?) who will, ostensibly, teach you how to make pictures more or less like they shoot. These guys tend to produce flickr-ready landscapes or flickr-ready street photos. Technically solid, utterly derivative, very very popular on sharing sites with some equivalent to Trending Photos, and completely uninteresting to me. If you like that sort of thing, shop around, there's a lot to choose from.

I'm not a particular expert on anything technical, although I can generally muddle my way through the technical details of whatever to make a pretty good picture when technique is necessary. As a muddler, though, I probably shouldn't be teaching.

I'm haven't got any special skill in shooting exceedingly derivative 500px-ready photographs of any particular stripe. It's another thing I can muddle through, but usually only by accident, because frankly the whole thing skeeves me out entirely. I hate that crap. So, I probably shouldn't be teaching people how to do that either. Partly because I haven't got any special insight and partly because I'd end up screaming at the students.

The only things I can think of that I could legitimately do a workshop on is some sort of history of photography (after a bit of brushing up on the subject matter) or on the processes of inspiration.

And, to be honest, you can just look that stuff up, or read old posts on this blog. You'd have to be some kind of idiot to pay someone to teach you that stuff.

Beyond that I could probably yell at you to stop producing derivative garbage, to stop pixel peeping, to stop fucking around in photoshop.

Not sure there's a really big market for that, though. Maybe I should do a youtube video.

1 comment:

  1. If you manage to write a very good workhop about inspiration and the creation process, you will make a real accomplishment, as those I found so far can be summarized as "Get creative by being inspired". How helpful this is. Moreover, this topic would be beneficial to a large audience, that extends far beyond photography.

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