So for about 9 days I fell off the face of the earth and I guess I should fill everyone in on where I went and what I was doing. Well, I was attending the Foundation Workshop in Austin, TX. The Foundation Workshop is a 5 day intensive photojournalism workshop geared towards wedding photographers. It is taught by a group of former, and present, working photojournalists and it is unlike any other photographic workshop I have ever encountered. For one, you don’t shoot brides, or weddings, or models, or any other fake construct developed for the sake of a workshop. Each student is given an assignment and they are sent out for 2-3 days of solid shooting followed by group critique sessions that last well into the night and early morning hours before heading out to shoot again. The goal, and it’s very effective at meeting it, is to teach you to see – to notice – in a completely different way. To take images that tie together as a visual story.
I can’t even begin to describe the experience except to say that it was eye-opening in every possible way. I am excited to get going on the upcoming wedding season in a way that I haven’t been since that first year in business. We’re not supposed to show much of the work we created during the workshop so as to keep from coloring the perceptions of future students, but we are able to show a limited selection. The first three images in the slideshow above were taken while shooting my assignment at the Austin Humane Society, the remaining images were taken while wandering Austin with my friends (and supremely talented photographers) Ryan Jones, Olivia Brown, and Sherry Pickerell a couple days after the workshop ended.