Stuart Schwartz and Jock McDonald led a group of American photographers to Cuba for a week of shooting. The week started in Miami. Stuart Schwartz and Jock McDonald met their six workshop participants in a hotel the night before the flight to Cuba. The group spanned more than five decades in age and as many shooting styles.
“My chief concern was, are these people going to get along?” says Stuart. “It was a big cross-section of participants, but it was a harmonious group of people, they were a family. It was a family trip.”
It’s no secret that we live in a culture saturated with photographs. These days, any body with a phone is a photographer, and shooting pictures all the time. We look at images day in and day out, but what we don’t often see are photographs carefully considered and shot in way that really tells a story. Instructors Susanna Frohman and Kathleen Hennessy discuss how to tell a visually compelling story about a subject in your own backyard.
The Image Flow hosted cyanotype guru Daniel Coburn of the University of Kansas this past weekend for a three-day workshop. The diverse group of participants from across the country was nine-strong; 14-year-old prodigy Zac Mosher was the youngest, while the oldest (we won’t name names) was somewhere north of 70. Fun, photography, and Sol Food was had by all!
The Image Flow has long been known for its fantastic assortment of photography workshops, geared to all levels of photographers. This summer, The Image Flow is expanding its workshop offerings to include a whole host of workshops for photographers of all ages. From how to prepare for a major photographic excursion, to storytelling with images, TIF has a workshop for you.
In late 1972, 14-year-old rock photographer hopeful Bill Green began sneaking into the legendary Academy of Music in New York City to snap photos of rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest stars. His images quickly caught the eye of promoter Howard Stein who offered Bill full access in exchange for prints of his stylized black and white images. For the next three years, Bill photographed every show that came through NYC, including icons like Kiss, Alice Cooper, Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, Iggy Pop, Jethro Tull, The Who, Joe Cocker, Santana, and ZZ Top.
Eventually, Bill grew up grew up, and his life moved away from rock n’ roll. His catalog of some 20,000 images has been packed away for the last 40 years, until now. These incredible images will be part of a new show Rock Palaces of New York, The Fillmore East and The Academy of Music at New York’s Morrison Hotel Gallery, featuring the golden period of the NYC rock scene.
Herewith, five questions with Bill on his early obsession with photography, picking up girls, and how The Image Flow’s own Stuart Schwartz helped save a little bit of rock ‘n’ roll history.
Here at The Image Flow our clients often bring in photos to print that were made during amazing trips to every continent. Many of the images we see are world-class and require very little adjustment before an excellent print can be made. But an unfortunate percentage of camera work was not completely successful, and the finished product is limited by one or more technical mistakes made by the photographer in the field. No matter where your journeys may take you, a similar set of pitfalls can plague any photographer wherever she or he may go.
Photographer Daniel Coburn says photography is about ideas. “As image makers we have a valuable opportunity to engage with a variety of historical processes, to make images that are beautiful, unique, and rich in concept.”
Daniel first discovered 19th century alternative photographic processes as an undergraduate studying under the accomplished alternative process photographer Marydorsey Wanless. Although he has recently come to be known for his work with the cyanotype process, Daniel has worked in the full range of alternative processes. He says it’s not about the process; it’s about choosing the right process for the project.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is designed to make everything about digital photography easier. Many photographers, from amateur to professional, have put Lightroom at the center of their digital imaging workflow. Whether your photos are from that “trip of a lifetime,” or for a paying client, Lightroom offers a suite of tools and editing system for your most important work. And—the Develop module in Lightroom has even replaced the need to use Photoshop to process most images made with modern digital cameras. This is an essential program for photographers on the go.
In her Lightroom workshop, Taralynn Lawton shows you how to automatically embed your name and copyright information in each of your photos during import, and how to delete images in batches—a great way to get rid of out-of-focus or otherwise unusable images, without having to delete them one by one.
Taralynn also shows you how to take advantage of Smart Previews, so that you can store your images on an external drive, and still access them with the Develop module, even if the external drive isn’t attached. Once the external drive is plugged back in, Lightroom will automatically sync any changes you made while the file was offline. This feature wasn’t available until Lightroom 5, and is a valuable new feature for photographers who travel!
Constance Chu, the newest member of The Image Flow team, has a PhD in psychology with an emphasis in neuroscience and her most recent job was working with autistic kids doing applied behavioral analysis. So what is she doing at The Flow you ask? No, she’s not developing a new darkroom process—yet.
“Photography is my passion!” she says. “I want to be immersed in photography. I want to be around it all the time.”
Photographer and filmmaker Gary Yost will present a series of short films at the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts including the premier of his new project, Mountains Made of Chalk, Fall into the Sea, Eventually The film features the work of artist Genna Panzarella, who paints a 10-foot-wide mural of Mt. Tamalpais as it was when it was whole—literally inside what used to be the mountaintop. The film will premier with Gary’s new series about Mill Valley at a special event at the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts on Thursday, April 2 at 7PM.
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