Course Description

The Central Coast of California is rich with great photographic opportunities, both for the landscape and portrait photography. This workshop provides essential and necessary skills and techniques to help the well rounded photographer achieve a sense of visual design and story-telling. A photographer must use the tools of light, luminance and color in order to portray or capture a certain aspect or essence of the subject. The concept for the photo is the first and most important step in making an effective photo. This idea leads us to the technique that will provide the best impact for meaningful images. All the aspects of lighting, posing, tonalities, mood, expression, camera angles to backgrounds must harmonize to create an successful photograph.

The area around Morro Bay and Los Osos is outstanding beautiful with scenes of the rocky shore and bluffs, the fantastic waves and surfers, many colorful and fun farmer's markets, and special events during this time like the Cruisin' Morro Bay Classic Car Show. We have the opportunity to make outstanding images of both the gorgeous places and the wonderful people in the area. We will spend time on learning how to communicate with your subjects, how to approach, make them feel at ease and how to pose and direct them to make a strong image. One of the workshop days will be spent with models on location.

Learning to see, understand and manipulate light is an important element in any photograph, so establishing a strong foundation in the fundamentals of lighting is key to successful images. We will be using both natural and flash and we will explore the three main elements of light: direction, quality and depth and we will cover everything from esthetics to hardware.

With natural light, we find the light and modify and manipulate it by the use of reflectors and diffusers. The use of portable flash, how they work and the step by step set-up is fully explained and demonstrated. The participants will have hands-on experience every day working with the lights and the modifiers. Exposure techniques, histograms, and balancing light will all be covered in detail.

This dynamic four day workshop is for emerging photographers or those who seek to make better photographs without a lot of extensive equipment. Participants should have good camera skills and basic use of Photoshop, or Lightroom, or Photo Elements.