Depth of Field Exploration Session. Photo by Winnie Johnston.
It dawned on me when I woke up this this morning (sorry about that) that as of this summer, I have been teaching photography for 30 years. So this has been a memories kind of day and I went back through hundreds of photos from past workshops. And then I looked for photos that people took of me at the workshops. I share several of them in this article.
A portrait demonstration. Photo by Winnie Johnston.
It started in 1995 when Jim Riegel, the head of the photography department at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts asked me to teach a 6 week summer photography class with an emphasis on nature photography. I loved it. It went so well that I was asked to do semester long class for the fall semester, the coming spring semester, and every fall and spring after that. Class sessions were every Tuesday evening for 3 hours. I packed so much info into my classes that some students, like Jeremy Bruskotter (more about him later), took my class more than once. I created about 200 pages of handouts to supplement what I did in the class sessions. Those handouts helped a lot when I was asked to write a photography book in the famous “For Dummies” series.
During a field trip to Thorne Swift Nature Preserve. Photo by Winnie Johnston.
Each semester my class included a half dozen Saturday morning field trips to various nature locations in southwest Michigan, plus Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids Michigan which gave us an indoor place to shoot all manner of tropical flowers and plants when it was cold and nasty outside. The nice folks at Meijer Gardens let my class in one hour before opening so we could use tripods for an hour. When they opened the doors to the public we put our tripods away and did hand held photography for another two hours.
Chasing aspen leaves in Colorado. Photo by Bob Walker.
Mostly I was the nature photography specialist on KIA’s adjunct faculty. But they were short on faculty one semester and I did an afternoon weekly photography class that included a little of everything, including photo basics, flash photography, flower photography, architectural photography, portrait photography, and nude photography. Teaching at the KIA sadly came to an end when my “day job” transferred me from Michigan to Ohio.
Giving photo instructions in Grand Rapids Michigan. Photo by John Weese.
In 2011, Ohio State University was looking for a person to do a weekend photo workshop once per summer at OSU’s Stone Laboratory (which is on Gibraltar Island in Lake Erie). They asked Jeremy Bruskotter, who had joined the OSU faculty, to do that. He said he would do it on one condition. He told them about me, that I was the person who taught him photography, and he said he would do it provided he and I did the workshops as a team. OSU agreed. We did a workshop at Stone Lab every summer for several years. Then Jeremy’s academic calendar changed and we could no longer do the workshops.
During an indoor class session. Photo by John Weese.
OSU-Mansfield was looking for someone to do one spring and one fall photo workshop every year on a Saturday, and they asked me to do that based on good reports about the Stone Lab photo workshops. I agreed. Even though it wasn’t part of the official schedule, I managed to work in some field trips in addition to the regular Saturday workshops. It is so important to go out in filed trips and practice what you are learning about in the classroom.
During a workshop field trip to Upper Tahquamenon Falls. Photo by Winnie Johnston.
Graceland University invited me to do a winter term photography class in 2012. It was great fun. In addition to the daily morning class sessions, I arranged a bunch of field trips evenings and weekends.
Out on a Northern Michigan field trip chasing tiny flowers. Photo by Winnie Johnston.
And then I was invited to come back to Michigan and do some one day photo workshops in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. I was also invited to do annual weekend workshops at Park of the Pines, a campground up north.
Leading a field trip in Rocky Mountain National Park. Photo by Rich Kohlman.
Bob Walker, my brother-in-law and photo buddy, invited me to do annual weekend photography workshops in the fall in Rocky Mountain National Park, and after several years as a change of pace, I led a 4-day photo safari all over western and southwestern Colorado.
Field trip at Lake Michigan Shores Roadside Park. Photo by Winnie Johnston.
I’ve have accepted invitations to do half day or one day photo workshops across the country and up in Calgary Alberta. I even did a one-on-one photo seminar on a plane trip to California.
A portrait demonstration. Photo by Winnie Johnston.
All of my workshops are a mixture of learning/exploration sessions inside, and “go out and do it” field trips outside.
Making photo notes during a Northern Michigan workshop field trip. Photo by Winnie Johnston.
In addition to workshops, I have been doing one-on-one photo sessions. Sometimes they are right after a workshop. One young woman had such a great time at my Colorado weekend workshop one year that her mother contacted me and made plans to give her daughter a birthday present of a half day (5 hour) one-on-one session following my Colorado workshop the following year. One-on-ones are usually 2-5 hours long or in some cases from dawn to dark. After one of my Michigan workshops, one photographer asked me to do a weekend long one-on-one session in northern Michigan later that year, so I did.
Photographers: Winnie Johnston who is in charge of my Northern Michigan workshops, Bob Walker who is in charge of my Colorado workshops, John Weese who helped with my Southern Michigan workshops, and Rich Kohlman who helped with my Colorado workshops. (A special thanks to Winnie who has probably taken more photos of me than any other photographer.)