Mt. Equinox reflection-student image

The Shooting Like a Pro class that Scott Rouse and I taught finished this afternoon and I must say that everything went very well. Most of the last two days we spent developing each student’s ideas for a project or two (or three!) and as I went around the room I was impressed with not only the quality but the richness of each of the ideas. These will be the projects they will pursue when they get home and now they are fully armed with all the knowledge and know-how for getting their ideas into print, on to walls and inside their books.

We heard about project/story ideas about horses, rivers, Dallas, San Antonio, Indianapolis, symphonies, Africa, Narraganset Bay, harbors, San Francisco, fog, farms, chefs, small town Texas, lakes and love, waterfalls, the Rockies and New Hampshire. This all from only 10 people! I am tempted to give you more details of their ideas but I don’t want to spoil them for when they debut as magazine pieces or for when there is a book signing at your local bookstore. I will say that there were several ideas that I found to be very intriguing, intriguing enough for me to really enjoy doing them.

The class spent one afternoon on the farm where I did my recent book with the assignment or photographing a story of what was going on that day. these images are just part of each of their stories.

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Another morning the classl came up to my place and tried different photo techniques on two horses with the considerable help of my friends and pro photographers, Lisa Cueman and Jeff Wendorff.

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All of these images were taken by our students with a purpose in mind. The class wasn’t about taking even more pretty pictures, it was about telling stories and discovering that there is so much more to photography than taking an endless string of individual images. In fact, that was one of the themes of the class- photographing purposefully. I will post some more images and a short video of some of the other things we did during the class soon. Thanks to all of my students- nothing is better for a teacher than having attentive, enthusiastic and bright students.