Southern Vermont
October 2008
We’ve done a bunch of photography workshops in recent years and they always seem to be towards the south so this time we decided to head in the other direction. We came across the Klass Photography website and signed up for his “Digital and Fall Foliage in Southern Vermont” workshop. Instruction was provided by Raymond Klass with his mom, Sharon Klass, providing assistance.
Home base for the workshop was the Cooper Hill Inn run by Charles and Lee Wheeler. The inn is situated in an awesome location that, in itself, was very picturesque. Facilities were comfortable and serviced by innkeepers who obviously enjoyed having us there. They were very accommodating to our shooting schedule and cooked some great meals. Thank you Charles and Lee!
Much to our surprise there were only six participants (including us) in this workshop. That resulted in a lot more individual attention than we have ever experienced in a workshop. It was nice being able to say that we met all the participants and got to know them. All of the participants were shooting with DSLRs. 4 Nikon, 1 Canon, and 1 Sony. Raymond is a Nikon shooter and Sharon was in the Canon camp.
This was a 2 ½ day workshop that got us out shooting in the best light which, I’m sure you know, is early and late in the day. I would say we were out shooting perhaps 60% of the time. I, for one, would have preferred making a couple more shooting stops but the distance between stops seemed long which is probably the nature of things in Vermont.
One unique feature brought into the workshop were the “assignments”. It was interesting capturing images that leaned towards a piece of art, a photograph, or music but we had difficulty doing these. Photography for us tends towards seeing the detail and trying to capture what we see. Basically striving towards giving the website visitor a glimpse into what was seen at the time we pressed the shutter. There is, however, something to be said for reaching outside one’s comfort zone which we had to do. We most certainly learned from the experience and are better for it.
As always we come away from a workshop with something learned…
Both of us captured some images in RAW for the first time. We played with the files on our laptop and can see the benefit of increased control. We are not “converts” yet but we tried it.
We captured some panoramas and stitched the images together in Photoshop Elements 6. We were pleasantly surprised at how well they came out even though we were not using special equipment on our tripods.
Raymond’s hint when taking a panoramic series of capturing a black image before and after the series was simple and made me think “dah!”. Why didn’t I think of that!
Kathy, who is more into macro than me, got to try Raymond’s Nikon 200mm macro lens. Very nice. Will she be getting one? Probably not because of cost and weight. The 105mm or 60mm versions? Time will tell….
We’ve used our histogram display before but didn’t totally understand what it meant. Raymond’s explanation of it’s meaning and what can be done to shift it was extremely helpful. Wish I had a nickel for every time I referred to it after his explanation….
Samples of the 300+ images we took can be found here.....
Click on Kathy's picture to
see her images....
Click on Joe's picture to see
his images....
| New October 2008 |