As a photographer, I am a self-proclaimed workshop junkie. I go to a couple of photography workshops a year, like clockwork. And for the most part, I come home from my time with X,Y,Z Super So and So with a better understanding of what is so special about X,Y,Z, but no clearer idea of what it is that I have to bring to the table as a photographer. Workshops are great to learn things: shortcuts, money-makers, tips and tricks of the trade. But, they are, by nature more about learning to do things like someone else and less about finding a personal voice. There is no shortcut or photoshop action to get to that.
I set out for the Foundation Workshop with the “regular” workshop template in mind. I told people how excited I was to get to work with so many top wedding photojournalists from across the country. Getting to work with “them” was what I thought it was all about. And it was, but with a kicker.
At Foundation Workshop, participants are divided into teams and given individual assignments. They go out, shoot, and bring back their pictures to a room full of top photographers committed to providing guidance. The process is EVERYTHING at the workshop. Participants are pushed to their limits, where they find new territory for themselves as photographers. exploring how to express themselves better through THEIR pictures.
I keep hearing Huy say, “Your pictures are your voice. Make your pictures talk. Don’t be boring.”
I had the perfect team leader for me this year, Amy Deputy (if you feel up to having your heart broken, check out her slideshow on her blog), and the perfect team of mentors, Jay, Anja, Sergio and fellow team members, Erin, Marcin, Scott, Daniel. I was exactly where I needed to be and with the people I needed to be with, and for that, I am forever grateful. Life is not generally so precise.
I keep thinking, “Love and joy and excitement,” because that is what my Foundation Workshop experience felt like. My heart still feels a bit bruised, quite frankly, from feeling so much.
I know next year at the workshop will be different. And I expect the experience will be some whole new kind of wonderful. Whatever it is, I’ll be there with two camera bodies, three lenses a couple of flashes and my own particular way of seeing. My own particular way of seeing is still a work in progress, but far and away the best thing I found at Foundation this year.
The images below are some of my favorites from my assignment at the Sunstone Yoga Teacher Training Facility. I was reminded, working the images, of Amy’s comment during our team portrait session, “I see beauty. I see light.”
Yes, and Yes. Perhaps it was just the 101.3 degree room during the yoga class fogging up my brain and muddling my sensibility. But my time at Sunstone was spent basking in a collective radiance. Considering that the Sunstone participants are only four weeks into their 8 week intensive course (14 hours a day, 5 days a week), I can only imagine what they will be like at the end of their training. I wish that I could see them, because I know I would be dazzled. I felt privileged to spend time there and changed, in some quiet deep way that I haven’t figured out yet.
I do know, however, and honor, that my personal Foundation experience was forged as much from sitting in on Philosophy Class at Sunstone Yoga and sweating it out with the girls during their daily Fire Yoga classes as it was from editing photos back at the hotel. Many things said at Sunstone rang true to me, chief among them, “Change your thoughts and change your reality.” That is a pretty tall order for any workshop, anywhere, with any group of people, but that comes closest to describing what Foundation Workshop was like for me.








