The Critique and Show Can Be the Best Parts of a Workshop - Professional Photography -
Professional Photography » The Critique and Show Can Be the Best Parts of a Workshop
The Critique and Show Can Be the Best Parts of a Workshop

By Jay Dickman 

In my last post, I talked about how to choose the photography workshop that’s best for you. I suggested that one good question to ask is how your work will be critiqued. At FirstLight Workshop, part of our model is to work with each photographer in a daily edit session. We provide a half-hour or so for a direct one-on-one session.

I encourage those students who are waiting for their edit sessions to pull up a chair up and listen, because the advice given during every edit session can prove to be one of the most educational aspects of our, or any, workshop. 

We also do a daily show of our students’ best work. It is mandatory that all students be present for this, and I really want them to bring their voices to this.  The daily show can open your eyes and creative spirit, because you may see how another photographer shot the horse round-up at dawn in Dubois. He may have shot it in a way you hadn’t even considered.

At the end of each workshop week, we invite residents of the community to our print show so they can see how the photographers at the FirstLight Workshop have depicted their lives. These shows are wonderful! Jay Kinghorn (my co-author on Perfect Digital Photography, long-time FirstLight instructor, and our IT guy) uses our two 44-in. HP Designjet Z3100 printers to output large prints of each student’s best photos. Each student receives four or five 13 x 19-in. prints as well as one 18 x 24-in. print.We chose to use HP Professional Satin Photo Paper for all of the prints, after we discovered that prints with a lot of contrast or deep blacks didn’t look their best on the fine-art paper we’d been using for some prints.  

Every photographer I know has favorite papers for different looks, but we wanted one paper surface that would provide the visual and surface feel we wanted for all the types of images our students were shooting. Our print shows generally feature a mix of black-and-white images, portraits, and landscapes, and HP’s Professional Satin Photo Paper really covers the bases beautifully. We have yet to find that image that doesn’t “glow” with this paper surface.

I rent/borrow gallery space in which to hang the show. Hanging the show is fairly simple. We inset the photos so the image has a one- to three-inch white border. This creates a simple matte feel without adding a mind-boggling amount of work! Our hanging system is usually equally simple: clear pushpins. Not fancy, but the images are so powerful that no one has yet to complain about this inexpensive, fast and non-obtrusive hanging method.We hang the show for the final night of the workshop. The students contribute elbow grease in cutting prints, organizing the groupings, and hanging the show.

In our Dubois workshop in Wyoming in July, I was up in the workshop HQ finalizing the show when Jeff Vanuga, one of our FirstLight instructors, came up to me to tell me we had a problem in the gallery. The students had finished hanging their work and were standing in front of their panels with big grins, not moving. 

Initially, when we took the show down we would give the smaller 13x19 prints to the subjects who were in attendance the night of the show. Now, the shows have become so popular that we leave them hanging in the community for a week or two. Our students leave a self-addressed mailing tube and we send each of them their large print post-event.
Posted 10-13-2008 11:15 PM by Eileen Fritsch
Filed under: , , ,
Powered by Community Server (Non-Commercial Edition), by Telligent Systems