For the last two years I’ve visited Las Vegas for the Photoshop World photography conference in September. While the conference is great fun and you learn a load I thought this year I’d try something different. So for a change I decided to go on a Photography Workshop. I looked online for a workshop I liked the sound of and found a local Photographer (based out of Seattle) who ran a number of workshops all over the county.
Justin Resnick (here’s a link to his site) is a landscape photographer who travels all over the world. He has workshops all over mainland USA and others in Hawaii, New Zealand and Iceland. As some of the overseas workshops are pretty expensive I wanted to make sure I learnt something from Justin first and liked his training/teaching style. So for my first workshop I opted for “Palouse”.
Where the heck is Palouse I hear you say?
Well Palouse is an agricultural region in western Washington. It’s right on the Washington, Idaho border spanning down to the top of Oregon, and the best bit is I can drive there from Seattle in around 4 hours. The thing that makes Palouse interesting is the land formation. Imagine miles and miles of undulating hills, all different shades of green! It’s really something amazing to see.
So I booked a place on the workshop and off I went.
The workshop lasted four days and was pretty intense. We would get up at 4am go out and shoot sunrises, come back to the hotel for 6am, have breakfast and go to sleep for a few hours, head out at midday and shoot until sunset. Try doing that for four days.
During the workshop I shot around 3,500 images and I’ll still be processing the shots in August. This blog post just includes a few of the early processed ones I really liked.
So what was the workshop like? Well there were only 5 students in total so we all got lots of time with Justin. Justin was just fantastic. He’s an amazing photographer and spent the whole time making sure our experience was great. All he cared about was did we get the shots we wanted, did we have any questions, where did we want to go to today?
At each location he would tell us what to look for, where best to set up and what the best composition was. I really learnt a load and will definitely attend one of his workshops again.
One of the highlights of the trip was our visit to Palouse Falls for a sunset shot. This is a huge waterfall in the middle of nowhere. In fact it’s now the official waterfall of Washington state. When we arrived Justin explained how we had to set up right on the cliff face. This was pretty scary but definitely gave us the best view and some amazing shots.
Anyway I LOVED the workshop, and will try and get on another one next year. Hope you like the images.
