Illuminated Ground is the name for this educational opportunity to re-examine our image making process from image capture to post-production and photographic interpretation.

A better understanding of what lies at the core of what we choose to photograph is an important starting point for finding the threads of connection that appear and re-appear throughout our personal work. It's crucial to have a functional understanding of how our cameras work, but it is also important to refine our visual voice and make images that satisfy our creative needs and hopefully demand a second look from the viewer.

Have you ever tried to describe how your photographs make you or your viewer feel? Are they more poetry or more prose? Is your "intention" articulated clearly to the viewer? Do their eyes and mind travel easily throughout the frame by your use of color, shades of tone, line, focus or gesture? Photography can be a method of exploring our surroundings and ourselves by engaging our creative and intuitive impulses in a more subjective way. Unlike making an objective record, our subjective response leads to personal interpretation.

Through assignments, presentations, field trips, and discussions, we'll examine the impulse that makes us bring a camera up to our eye to make a photo. we will explore blending together camera know-how, compositional concerns, balance, and other formal elements, with our intuition and emotional intelligence. In that moment, we will explore the merging of right and left brain concerns that leads to more photographic success.

For information about workshops, tutorials, portfolio reviews and event speaking, please call me at

413-256-0779 or contact me through my website contact page.