Our workshop schedule for the first part of 2015 is set, including the workshops and classes we do in partnership with Samy’s Camera at our studio. This year we will concentrate on OCF (off camera flash), Beginning and Advanced Studio Portrait Lighting, the Wedding Workshop and a Post Production Workshop. We also plan to have at least one environmental location portrait / fashion shoot with a great model. Below are brief descriptions of each class or workshop; what we’ll cover, the best experience level you should have to take full advantage of the information presented, the gear you should bring, etc.

We will have models to photograph at our workshops; these could be couples, for the wedding workshop, or individuals for the OCF and Studio Portrait Lighting workshops. You will  photograph the models, and come away with nice images, but these workshops are not meant to be “Portfolio Building Events”, they are meant to teach you how to recreate each situation and give you a better understanding of lighting, posing and the photographic process.

If you are considering attending one of our workshops but have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email or call us. We’re always happy to chat with you to make sure you attend and benefit from the right workshops for you.

THESE ARE THE 2015 CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS ALREADY SCHEDULED… MORE TO COME!

Wednesday, February 4th,  7 to 10 pm: OFF CAMERA SPEEDLITE FLASH WORKSHOP. Investment: $49.95. Sign up through Samy’s Camera Photo School

Sunday, February 8th,  9:30 am to 4:30 pm: WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP. Investment: $150.00. Sign up through Samy’s Camera Photo School

Sunday, March 8th,  1 to 4 pm: ADVANCED STUDIO LIGHTING. Investment: $75.00. Sign up through Samy’s Camera Photo School

Saturday, March 21st, 10:30 to 1:30: OFF CAMERA SPEEDLITE FLASH WORKSHOP. Investment: $49.95. Sign up through Samy’s Camera Photo School

Saturday, March 28th,  10 am to 5 pm: WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP. Investment: $150.00. Sign up through Samy’s Camera Photo School

Thursday, April 16th,  6:30 pm to 9:30 pm: POST PRODUCTION WORKSHOP Investment: $49.00. Sign up here.

Saturday, April 18th,  1 to 4 pm: ADVANCED STUDIO LIGHTING. Investment: $75.00. Sign up through Samy’s Camera Photo School

Sunday, April 26th, 1 to 4 pm: OFF CAMERA SPEEDLITE FLASH WORKSHOP. Investment: $49.95. Sign up through Samy’s Camera Photo School

Sunday, May 3rd, 10 am to 1 pm: DISPLAY CALIBRATION & COLOR MANAGEMENT  Investment: $79.00. Sign up here.

 * * * * * * LIGHTROOM TRAINING SERIES * * * * * * 

We’re very excited to have Barry Evans teaching an entire Lightroom series at our studio. We’ll start out this series with a beginner’s guide to Lightroom in our “Getting Up and Running With Lightroom” workshop. Then we’ll dive deeper into the different modules that Lightroom has to offer, with three separate seminars that will cover the Library, Develop, and Print modules. Full class descriptions are towards the bottom of this post.

About the instructor

Barry discovered photography when he was only twelve and was drawn to it immediately. As he matured as a photographer Barry was inspired by the work of Paul Caponigro and Ansel Adams, he was hooked for life!

Barry paid for his college education by taking photographic assignments and working full time in a camera store. The next thirty years have been a complete immersion in the photographic industry; from running retail operations and working as a manufacturer’s representative for Canon and Ilford to owning his own Studio and Lab. At the same time Barry has developed a very successful second career as a software consultant and educator, specializing in Adobe’s Lightroom.

Currently, Barry is the Pro Department Manager at Samy’s Camera in Santa Ana, and is passing on his thirty five years of technical experience though lectures, consulting and technical editing.

Intro to Lightroom

Wednesday, April 1st, 6:30 to 8:30 PM: GETTING UP AND RUNNING WITH LIGHTROOM. Investment: $29.00 Sign up here

In-depth Lightroom Module Workshops

Wednesday, April 22nd, 6:30 to 9:30 PM: THE LIBRARY, IMAGE MANAGEMENT IN LIGHTROOM. Investment: $69.00

Wednesday, April 29th, 6:30 to 9:30 PM: THE DEVELOP MODULE, CREATING A PERFECT IMAGE. Investment: $69.00

Wednesday, May 6th, 6:30 to 9:30 PM: THE PRINT MODULE, CREATING THE PERFECT PRINT. Investment: $69.00

We are offering a discounted price to those who invest in more than one Lightroom Module training workshop. If you purchase two out of the three workshops the price for both is $118 ($59 each). For all three Lightroom Module classes, the total investment is $147 ($49 each), and will also include an unique set of Lightroom presets to help you make your images stand out. To sign up for one or more Lightroom Module workshops click here.

OFF CAMERA SPEEDLITE FLASH WORKSHOP 

This 3-hour workshop is designed to get you up and running with your portable speedlite or on-camera flash. You will learn how to get the most from it – Hint, it usually means taking it off your cameras hot shoe and using remote triggering systems.

Concepts such as TTL metering, wireless flash, flash exposure compensation, and rear curtain sync will be covered. Bounce lighting strategies and using flash accessories such as small soft boxes, shoot through umbrellas, bounce cards, snoots, grids and colored gels will  also be discussed. This class will help you  take better flash photos. You will greatly improve your lighting skills and your images won’t have that “flashed” look.

This class is especially useful for wedding, event and portrait photographers who want to use OCF to enhance existing environmental outdoor and indoor lighting with minimum gear.

Experience Level: Beginner to Intermediate: Attendee should be familiar with the basic functions and menus of their camera and on-camera flash. Please review your camera and flash owner’s manual as much as you can before the class.

Requirements: Please bring you DSLR camera with 50mm lens or longer (70-200mm range lenses or zoom ideal), external flash, pocket wizard if you have one, and note taking materials. Make sure your battery is charged and you have room for photos on your memory card.

Investment: $49.95. Sign up through Samy’s Camera Photo School

WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP  Through Samy’s Camera

This jam-packed 7 hour workshop (with a lunch break) will not only be about the all-important photography side of weddings, including essential gear and techniques to get the job done. It will also cover the business of wedding photography. Our day will start in the classroom for an info-pack session covering the business end. Then, after lunch students will learn portrait posing and lighting techniques. We will provide a couple as the models, in “engagement session” wardrobe. After the shoot, we will cover post-processing, retouching and album design. The “shooting” section of this workshop usually takes place outdoors.

Topics covered: Marketing and networking to reach the right clients, price lists, websites and blogs, sales, contracts, engagement sessions, photo gear, posing, lighting (OCF), post production workflow (RAW & Lightroom), retouching, album design, photoshop retouching and album sales.

This workshop is perfect for photographers new to wedding photography, and those who have some experience and want to fine-tune their business, technical and artistic skills. It is a great, one day, intensive learning experience that will boost your skill levels in many key areas of our profession.

Experience Level: Intermediate. Attendees should have a good understanding of F-Stops, Shutter Speed, ISO, and be able to operate their camera in manual mode. Basic understanding of flash photography is also important. Please review your camera and flash owner’s manual as much as you can before the class.

Requirements: Please bring your camera, lenses, flash and note taking materials. Make sure your battery is charged and you have room for photos on your memory card.

ADVANCED STUDIO LIGHTING  Through Samy’s Camera

In this 3 hour, hands-on portrait lighting workshop, held in a working studio, we will show students how to use professional studio strobes in a fashion / portrait environment.  We will work with one, two and three light setups with multiple light modifiers including soft boxes, umbrellas and reflectors. Background selection and posing techniques will also be discussed.  This is a shooting workshop where students will have a chance to photograph a model with their own cameras. Triggering devices (PocketWizards) will be provided if you don’t already have one.

Topics covered: Studio strobe lighting gear and techniques, soft boxes, umbrellas and reflectors, the right modifier to achieve the right look, metering and proper exposure, lens, f-stop and depth of field choices, positive and negative fill light, directing and posing a model, setting up a portrait studio.

In a controlled studio environment, your creativity is the only limit to what you can achieve. This workshop will take the mystery out of working with professional studio lighting, modifiers and metering,

Prerequisite: Having attended our BEGINNING STUDIO FASHION / PORTRAIT LIGHTING AND POSING WORKSHOP, unless prior arrangements have been made.

Requirements: Please bring your camera, portrait lens, 50mm or longer telephoto, (70-200mm range lenses or zoom ideal) and note taking materials. Be sure that your camera battery is charged and you have room for photos on your memory card. PocketWizard triggering device, if you have one.

Investment: $59.00. Sign up here:

If you also sign up for our BEGINNING STUDIO FASHION / PORTRAIT LIGHTING AND POSING the total investment for both is only: $99.00

The dates for this workshop will be published soon. If you receive our News Letter we’ll let you know as soon as they are available.

ENVIRONMENTAL FASHION / PORTRAIT WORKSHOP  Presented by Barnet Workshops

For this, aproximately 3 hour, workshop with a model, we will meet at one of several outdoor spots that provide good lighting, good backgrounds and most importantly, a good range of interesting and challenging close by locations. We will bring battery operated 500 Ws B1 off camera flash units with modifiers, reflectors and translucent panels to help us work with existing light. We will explain how we “see” in a given environment to achieve the images we’re after. This is a fun, informative workshop, but it will also give the students a great opportunity to create beautiful portfolio images. This event is limited to only 8 participants.

Experience Level: Beginners with a working knowlage of their camera and Intermediate. Attendees should have a good understanding of f-Stops, Shutter Speed, depth of field and ISO, they should be able to operate their camera in manual mode. Basic understanding of flash photography is recommended but not a must.

Requirements: Please bring your camera, portrait lens, 50mm or longer telephoto, (70-200mm range lenses or zoom ideal) and note taking materials. Be sure that your camera battery is charged and you have room for photos on your memory card. PocketWizard triggering device, if you have one.

Investment: $49.00.  The dates for this workshop will be published soon. If you receive our News Letter we’ll let you know as soon as they are available.

POST-PRODUCTION WORKSHOP  Presented by Barnet Workshops

This 3 hour workshop, usually offered on a weekday evenings from 6:30 to 9:30 pm is taught by Mirta Barnet. Mirta will cover RAW workflow in Lightroom and Photoshop. She will touch on the kind of workflow we use for our wedding coverages, but this class deals mostly with workflow related to a much smaller number of images as in a portrait, fashion or commercial assignments. The emphasis will be in Lightroom corrections, online Client gallery creation, Lightroom enhancing and Photoshop retouching.

Experience Level: Beginner and Intermediate photographers. Basic knowledge of Lightroom and Photoshop recommended.

Requirements: Note taking materials. Cameras are not necessary. You may bring your laptop, but only to take notes if that’s how you like to take notes. Because Mirta will cover a wide variety of skills, “follow along” with your computer is not possible.

Investment: $49.00 Sign up for our next post-production workshop here.

Getting Up and Running with Lightroom 

Do you want to find out if Lightroom is the right editor and image management tool for you? Start with this two hour workshop and see if it is the perfect fit. This overview starts by explaining the advantages of a Lightroom workflow over all of the other image editors available, then shows you how to set Lightroom up to maximize those strengths. It will then reveal which tools are best suited to enhancing your photographs and how to apply them.

Whether you’re a landscape or portrait photographer working with 100 images after a shoot or an event shooter with 3000 images from a wedding, this class is the essential start up guide, designed to save you many hours of frustrating and confusing experimentation.

The Library Module, The Develop Module, & The Print Module

The Library, Image Management in Lightroom

Do you have thousands of photographs but cannot find the one you are looking for? This deep dive into Lightroom’s Library will show you how to find any image in less than fifteen seconds, no matter how big your catalogue has become.

Adobe created Lightroom to give us control over digital images, this class will show you the path to mastering this powerful tool. Starting with the creation of new libraries, you will be shown the strategies for optimizing you photographic library.

The Develop Module, Creating a Perfect Image

Bewildered by all of the enhancement tools available in Lightroom? This is the class to choosing and mastering those tools. Learn to optimized your photographs as never before. Cropping, color balance, exposure correction, contrast, burning, dodging, black and white conversion and more. Then, learn to use Lightroom’s “Presets” to shape your styles and techniques and to make your style instantly repeatable. Lightroom is especially useful when you need to correct and enhance multiple images, from a handful to a complete wedding in the shortest amount of time, without using Photoshop.

The Print Module, Creating the Perfect Print

Creating a Master Print is not a random event, whether you print yourself or use a photo lab, it is time to take control of how your photographs appear in print. This is the only class you will ever need to master the concepts of color profiles, gamut and soft proofing to craft the perfect print. It continues by teaching you how to control the placement of your photograph on a page, setting precise borders and image size.

The “end game” of photography is to create a beautiful photograph; a print, that you’re proud to display or to deliver to your client. This class will teach you to print your image exactly the way you intended it to be.

Understanding Display Calibration & Color Management

Whether you use a professional lab or make your own prints, precise monitor calibration is crucial to achieving accurate color, contrast and density. What you see in your monitor has to match what your printer sees in theirs in order to produce the beautiful prints, canvases or albums you worked so hard and long to create. Calibrating your monitor can be confusing and frustrating, even for seasoned pros, but with the tools available today, monitor calibration is easy and fast. You just have to understand the process and know how to do it.

In this entertaining and fun class, Art will touch on a brief history of color and how we perceive it, he will share the simple principles and easy facts of monitor and color calibration, from pre-capture to print. You will learn how to interface with your lab profiles in order to achieve amazing color consistency, whether you’re a fine art photographer or a wedding shooter with 100 images per assignment.

Art will teach the proper method of monitor and laptop screen calibration, along with the most efficient way to setup your monitor for a consistent color workflow. Bring your monitors and color calibration device, if you have one. During the last hour of this class, Art will be happy to provide hands-on help calibrating your displays. And, if you plan to purchase a new monitor, Art will go over your options and what monitors will make the best investment.

Click here to check out Art Suwansang in X-Rite’s Color Talk discussing the importance of monitor calibration.

As will all of your workshops, we will be raffling great Bay Photo photographic and printed products.

Our next calibration workshop will be Sunday, May 3rd. To sign up click here.