Why Is It Beneficial to Attend Photography Workshops?

Photography Tips

A photography workshop is a place to which everyone who is interested in photography should pay a visit every once in a while; especially workshops organized by renowned professionals. It’s a great place to observe and learn, not to mention the opportunity to discuss your own ideas with expert photographers. The experience and knowledge that you can gather from a good photography workshop is simply something that you cannot acquire anywhere else. In the span of this article, we’ll try to understand the advantages of attending a photography workshop and also how it could help an amateur as well as a professional.

Inspiration

Photo by Nathan Rupert; ISO 100, f/4.0, 1/513-second exposure.

Be it a workshop on landscapes or fashion, if the subject of the workshop is where your interests lie, you can often be extremely motivated by such an exposure. Even pros can find their spirits rekindled at such a workshop or it can inspire a photographer from a different field to try something new for a change.

Hassle-Free Travel

A photography workshop can also involve a tour to some of the most picturesque locations around the world. As these tours are organized by experts who know the best places and times to capture photographs from experience, you get the occasion to concentrate on what you want to capture rather than spending the valuable time on the details of traveling to different locations while on tours. All the hassles and management are taken care of while you get all the time in the world to concentrate on your personal photographic endeavors. As a touring workshop involves a lot of outdoor photography, young photographers learn how to control shutter speed, exposure, aperture and other settings in different light conditions in order to capture that perfect photo. They may not get it right at the beginning but the advantage of a photography workshop is that the professionals are there to guide. Experience from such workshops also teaches the attendants to rely less on image editors and more on themselves and their cameras.

Like Minds

One of the greatest pleasures of going to a photography workshop is that you get to meet people who are just as much in love with photography as you are—or perhaps even more. A non-professional photographer may have a hard time finding people around him/her who are equally serious about photography, and to them, a photography workshop is a perfect place to contribute ideas and gain knowledge from people who share the same passion. Apart from fellow photographers, the experts who are leading the workshop would be around to help all the attendants of the workshop with their experience and knowledge. It is a great place to learn something new or to brush up on the old amidst the company of like minded individuals, sometimes even for the professionals.

Guidance

If you’re an amateur, a workshop is an excellent chance for you to show some of your own work to the renowned professionals present there. They may compliment you or may point you toward the errors in your way of capturing or may even agree to take you as an apprentice. To the beginner, the benefits of attending a photography workshop are tremendous, in fact it is perhaps the best way to reach out and learn from the best. A professional may know a lot but a single person cannot know everything and when many such professionals come together, it is only natural that information would be exchanged. News about the latest technology in photography is often discussed in these workshops as well as the latest trends in different fields of photography. Different point of views on the same subject may be expressed through the photos from different photographers and that works as an inspiration to many.

Visualizing an image even before you capture it is the first step towards taking an impressive photograph. In other words, you need to recognize the potential of a picture if you plan on doing some serious photography and for that you need to have the “photographer’s eye” of course, but the confusion that may boggle the mind of a young photographer regarding the merit of his/her recognition is often a hindrance. If you’re attending a workshop you can save a lot of time by learning from the experienced pro on how to be sure about what you are going to capture. The background, geometry, angle, proportion, aesthetics, and all other aspects that make a photograph truly beautiful and a piece of art is a hard process to learn, but it becomes easier if you have the guidance of pros and experts all around you.

Mind one thing though, photography is a form of art and each photographer has his/her signature style which develops as the photographer’s skills mature with experience. A photography workshop is not a place where you should be “told” what to do and what not to do; the experts will act more like guides who will point you in the right direction but you will walk toward it at your own pace and in your own way. In fact, teachers at these workshops often admit that it never is a one way process when they instruct amateur photographers; they acknowledge the fact that even they learn something from these minds.

Online Options

Apart from the classic onsite and touring photography workshops, there are also online workshops that take place these days which allow participation just like offline workshops. These workshops allow some neat features for the amateur photographers too. For example, you can get your captured images rated and criticized by pros both in order to know how skilled you are at this moment as well as for a nudge in the right direction. Unfortunately, they cannot be as beneficial as an onsite or touring workshop for  obvious reasons. If you want to mingle with photographers from different backgrounds and of different skill levels while learning directly from your favorite photographers, you will just have to attend photography workshops both near and far from you when possible.

About the Author:
Rhommel Bernardino is the creator and webmaster of photographyarticles dot net. He is a freelance photographer based in Toronto, Canada and has been shooting weddings, events, portraits, fashion, glamour and nudes for the last 5 years. He is also organizes photographic events like photo shootouts and occasionally hosts photography workshops in and around Toronto.