Just two short weeks ago, Kim and I held our most recent series of workshops to help beginning & more intermediate photographers take better images. They both sold out in just a couple weeks, and we had a jam-packed house all day long and we were so thrilled to have everyone join us!

Before I start recapping, I want to thank our sponsors for this workshop:

Gina, owner of Fiori Floral provided the beautiful boquet for our Bride and Groom shoot as seen down below in this post and ZuZu's Petals in Downtown Mesa for the beautiful centerpieces for our food table.



Our goal for the beginner workshop is to teach those just starting out to understand the fundamentals of photography, understand the basics of their cameras by turning them off the automatic setting to shoot manually, and thus more creatively.



Among several other things, we also teach attendees which lenses will deliver better quality images and the different effects you can get by adjusting your cameras manually.



Everyone was practicing adjusting their settings to compensate for me being back light by the window and I couldn't resist getting a shot of them!



Three of my former brides attended our Beginner Workshop, so I had to get a picture with them! L to R: Janna (2006), Shelley (2006), me, Christy (2008). Janna also stayed on for the Intermediate Workshop in the afternoon.



Here is our entire Beginner group:


For the intermediate class, we dive deeper into several areas, including lighting, communication, creative shooting and much more. For a full explanation of what we cover, you can visit our dedicated Blogsite: CreateBetterImages.com

But most importantly, we go outside to work with live models in two separate shoots and give the attendees lots of hands on practice!



This time we had a family with young children (since this is a group with which most budding photographers will find themselves working) as well as a "bride and groom" model. (Funny story there... read below.) It's great to be able to apply the lessons from the class into a live shooting scenario and explain with hands on experience how we find good light and work with existing light, pose our subjects, adjust our settings and more.

A couple shots of our adorable family that modeled for us. As you can imagine, the kids were a little nervous with 20+ photographers taking picture of them!



But we applied my favorite -- the tickle-approach -- and it worked like a charm!



After our family shoot, we spent another 45 minute or so working with our bride and groom models. Here are a few shots of Cristi, our "bride" (and I might add THE most photographed fellow photographer in the Phoenix area - but its easy to see why -- she rocks the camera!)



So funny story, Cristi's husband Curt was out of town for our shoot, so she brought his cousin Kevin along, which provided some good comic relief at moments when the posing got a little too "intimate." Of course there was NO KISSING or anything remotely similar :) At least we all laughed quite a bit and they were such troopers.


A few more shots of the attendees in action - Kim took these next three shots:





Here is most of our intermediate group. Cristi took this shot while some of us were still making our way downstairs for the live shoot.


Again, a big thank you to Gina, owner of Fiori Floral for donating this gorgeous bouquet! I absolutely love it and wish I had done something similar for my wedding several years ago.



To read some blog reviews by those in attendance, click here, here and here. Oh yeah, and here and here!
(Am I missing anyone? Please leave a comment with your blog link if so.)

To learn more about our workshops in general and find out details on the next one, click here.

Labels: WORKSHOPS

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