Speakers/Judges

 

speakers

doug hansgate - imagery to artistry, image sizing, less is more

Padma Inguva- flowers in a lightbox, places of worship, Black & White floral portraits

Bonnie Marquette - Macro and close up

phyllis Griffard - Plant it and they will come

ted jackson - the power of PHOTOGRAPHY

Judges

Doug Hansgate

Padma Inguva

Robby Bishop - robbybishop.com

Danny Izzo - nouveauphoteau.com

doug hansgate

bio

Doug’s work has been on display in galleries in New York City, Washington DC Smithsonian, Buffalo, PA and Toronto, including the world-famous Ontario Art Gallery. Doug is gifted in his ability to view a subject, see and distinguish slight nuances in light and tonal variations, capture that vision through photography and the capabilities of the camera, and express his vision through printed work.

Through his constant search for the very best technology, new techniques and tools, evolving styles, and an idealistic view of the world, Doug has become a sought-after educator. As a consummate instructor, Doug works hard to share his knowledge with fellow photographers. He teaches classes in Adobe® Photoshop® and Lightroom®, post production applications, high dynamic range, painter, and studio portraiture. His passion for sharing his knowledge is tempered only by the hours of the day and how much can be accomplished in one lifetime.

As you explore Doug’s work, you will surely see—and feel—the emotion and passion that he captures in every image, whether in his dreamscape series or iconic architectural images. As a sought-after judge of photographic imagery, Owner of AMP Studios, a successful commercial portrait and fashion photography studio in North Tonawanda, New York, Doug often says that if an image does not exude passion and does not evoke a sense of delight, sorrow, sadness, happiness, or desire, the image lacks the ability to be a sustainable work of art.

Doug is an extraordinary teacher and has a gift for simplifying things that leads to fast improvement.

www.hansgate.com

www.asthemistrises.com

topic - Thursday Evening Street Shoot

The prefect time to carry a portable lighting system, in this class I will show you how to use the perfect carry lights. The Westcott FJ Portable lighting systems with modifiers. In one small backpack I carry enough lights to light nearly any scenario. Three light sets with back lighting on street in the urban areas of the city are terrific.

We will have models here and I will show you how to pose for street photography fashion and personality shoots. We will be using the area in and around the hotel for this fast-paced lighting class. The trick is to learn how to balance all your light sources, ambient and strobes in a harmonious way using gels and light modifiers to control your light.

Bring your camera Doug will have triggers for your cameras to grab some shots of your own.  In these classes, the important part of the lesson is to learn to place lights appropriately, modify them, control them, and then worry about the posing.

topic - Equine Photography    

The portraits of horses relies heavily on the same things we want with human portraits. We expressive portraits that tell a story about the subject. It is majesty, quiet beauty, strength, calmness, wariness, inquisitive, friendly, and so much more. The clues to those expressions are different with horses than with humans. We after all can’t spin our ears around to express emotions, the horse can.

So as a portrait photographer of horses (an equine photographer) you need to not only study light, and of course your camera gear, you also need to study horse psychology. Often you will need to be a handler or at least understand what the handler does and cannot do.

Our mission in this class is not to teach you to be a trainer or handler of horses., that takes years of experience. This class will focus on good lighting practices, site evaluation, horse study, and creating images that the owner and caretaker of the horses will love. I don’t expect you to be able to look at horse and understand what they are thinking but as a good photographer of any subject it helps to have some clues. I guarantee the horse owner knows every nuance of head position, eye movement, eye shape, tail position and ear position.  I will give you those clues, teach you safety around horses, and allow you to capture images with your camera of these magnificent animals.

We will be using continuous lights in addition to the ambient light available to capture images that you and the horse owners will love.

I teach three-day workshop in the fall more fully preparing you to be a professional equine photographer, but in this 4 hours we will give you a great start.

Topic - image sizing

Image size is something that we all need to understand thoroughly. As a photographer, you need to know what is required for the web, for print, and for the lab. It is up to the photographer to make certain that his or her image is sized and rendered in the appropriate color space for the end user. A discussion of color spaces including Pro photo RGB, Adobe RGB 1998, and sRGB will be a part of our overall analysis of image sizing and manipulation to provide an end-user with exactly what they desire. We will discuss how to properly manipulate image size and understand resolution.

topic - less is More

As photographers we always see the entire scene, we wonder at the beauty in front of the camera, we want to express that emotion to the viewers of our images. Oh, the wonder of it all! We grab a wide angle, surely this wide view will show a viewer the magnificence we have before us.

We get home, we view the images with great expectation and shear exuberance thinking these are going to be awesome! Then reality sets in. Why don’t these images make the viewer just weep with joy or sadness, why is the emotion flat. Why is the viewer saying things like “that’s a pretty picture”, or “really nice”, instead of falling at your feet and asking you to take them with you next time, or I want to buy that!

The simple explanation although not always the case is that you have overwhelmed his/her senses. You have offered so much to them that they don’t know what to say or where to look. You have simply done the preverbal “data dump” of all time and they are overwhelmed. Humans can only absorb so much at once. When you ask them to teleport to the middle of a mountain top and flood them with input the reactions may not be what you were looking for.

Less is more is a concept that created to train photographers to look to the root of the subject. Much like a writer will tear my words apart on a page and say just get to the point. What are you trying to say? We as photographers need to push ourselves into the critical approach of showing what we want and getting rid of the rest.

Once you have established your image how do you manage the complexities of sizing for different sources. DO you save all the image sizes, should you just have one file? All these questions and more will be answered in the second half of the program.

Time is limited so be prepared to buckle yourself in for this fast-paced two-hour class.

topic - imagery to artistry

I would venture to guess that you got into photography to memorialize some event. A new baby, wedding, vacation, family, job, or just so that you could remember a day. Today, we all carry a device capable of doing just that. Memorializing an event.

The reason we stay with photography is much more complex. We find ourselves interested in the technology, or in what mother nature has to offer and we have never noticed before (ie. Macro). Sometimes it is because we want to express the feeling that we had when we witnessed an event or phenomenon. But for most the final image that the camera that we own leaves us wanting more. We say to ourselves. “If only had that really expensive camera system over there” looking enviously at the $50k system in the store.

  The sad truth is that the camera system itself is not capable of capturing your “feelings”, it only captures a two-dimensional view of light alone. No Sound (unless in video mode), no smell, no feelings of the wind or rain, only light. The trick with great photographers is that we learn how to give the viewer that sense of more! Just plain more! More of everything, more light, more depth, more contrast, more interest, more involvement, a place for the viewer to come and stay awhile. A place, in the image, where the present is only available in the image. When you have learned to do that, you have created art!

Now I’m not saying that in this two-hour class I will turn you into Picasso or Rembrandt, but I will show you what to look for in your images. How to bring out that subject, how to light it, how to keep your viewers’ attention, how to use our current technologies to give the viewer MORE!

We will explore techniques in Lightroom and Photoshop to modify the camera capture for emotion and expressive content. Examine the subject and understand what the maker is trying to say to the viewer. Remember, even though we may have made the image, we are really making the image for the final viewer, be it a judge, magazine reader, friend, or spouse. The final viewer needs to be able to feel what you felt and what you are trying to express. There are many ways to do that and some of them create phenomenal results. People call me a drama queen, and I guess it’s true because if an image doesn’t illicit some emotional response from the viewer it has no or very little meaning.

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padma inguva

Bio

Emigrated from India, Padma Inguva made a home in New Jersey for 21/2 decades. She inherited the love of gardening from her father; Made a humongous garden and spends many hours every spring taking care of the plants bringing them back from hibernation. Photography followed as a natural progression as a way to capture the fruits of her labor with her camera making them permanent. From flowers and foliage in her own garden, Padma's photography playground extended into neighborhood gardens, nurseries and botanical gardens. She relishes telling a story thru her images as she captures flowers thru all stages... from buds to decay. Padma Inguva’s passion for photography goes beyond her incredible love for photographing flowers. It extends to other genres such as architectural, and long exposure photography. She excels in photographing places of worship, especially interiors and she creates unique abstract imagery with seascapes using longer shutter speeds.

Padma teaches individual and group workshops in person and online.

Topic - Photographing flowers on a lightbox

In this presentation, Padma will share information about some of her techniques in creating stunning flower portraits using lightbox to bring out the translucency of the petals. Padma will discuss flower selection, various floral arrangements for better compositions, camera settings etc. If time permits, she will show how to post-process these images in Lightroom/Photoshop.

Topic - Photographing places of Worship

While countless photographers attempt to photograph churches, few succeed in capturing images that are as breathtaking as the churches themselves. The reason is  - photographing the inside of a church is hard. It takes an advanced skill-set to capture the three-dimensional beauty, found in reality with such high dynamic range, and convey the same level of emotion in the two-dimensional plane of a photograph.

In this program, Padma Inguva showcases her portfolio of images of places of worship, the equipment she uses, how she plans her visits, the research she does, proper etiquette to be observed while photographing, what settings to use when using a tripod vs shooting handheld, how to process the images after the capture to bring life to the images etc.

Topic - dramatic b&W floral portraits

When it comes to floral photography, one might think of capturing the vibrant colors. I love colorful flowers and my cultural background affords me to appreciate colors and their unusual combinations. So, the thought of creating black and white images of flowers sounded crazy. But I had a change of heart when I realized that pretty colors alone do not make a photograph interesting. Shape, texture, tones, and lines are integral parts of any composition. Limiting the color range of my flower photography helps me focus on these other elements. I took up a black and white photography project and I discovered (still discovering) new post processing techniques. In this program, I’m going to show how to apply black and white workflow to showcase flowers in exciting and dramatic ways.

https://www.padmasworld.com/religious-spaces

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bonnie marquette

BIO

Louisiana native and St. Francisville resident, Bonnie specializes in macro photography and capturing the beautiful sights that define this unique state. Her macro subjects are mainly nature, food and still life.

Author of the book “Macro and Close Up for Beginners,” she also teaches lessons in many of the exquisite gardens in the St. Francisville area and has a studio on her little farm in the woods she calls “Capture the Details.”

Winner of numerous International, National, Regional and Local awards, her work showcases the essence of this incredible area. Bonnie also works in the movie industry as a Location Manager/Scout and Stills Photographer where she photographs the actors, and has a background in graphic design and magazine publishing.

Topic - Macro and close up

Many photographers are curious but intimidated by the idea of shooting Macro or Close Up… they shouldn’t be! It doesn’t take expensive equipment to get started, most phones are now able to shoot close ups! The goal is to capture an image that tells a story, the difference is the story will be things and details that most people overlook or take for granted.

Through this presentation, Bonnie will walk you through the basics and cover three areas: nature, food and still life. The result will be that you not only start to notice tiny details you may otherwise miss but you learn how to capture them as well.

CapturetheDetails.com

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Phyllis Griffard

bio

Dr. Phyllis Baudoin Griffard is a biology educator from Lafayette Louisiana. She earned a BS in Zoology from USL in 1983, MS in Medicinal Chemistry from Purdue in 1987, and PhD in Science Education from LSU in 1999. Phyllis taught university biology around the world before retiring from the UL Lafayette Biology faculty in 2020. She received two major teaching awards and grants to support science education research and outreach. She is past President of the Acadiana Native Plant Project and board member of the Louisiana Native Plant Society, with which she launched the Louisiana Certified Habitat Program.  She produced a documentary film about DeafBlind Cajuns that premiered in 2022 and has another film about the Cajun Prairie that will premiere this year. Phyllis was honored to receive the Visionary Educator award from the Bayou Vermilion Preservation Association in 2023. Phyllis and her husband Pete live with their rabbit-alarm dog Eva on 7 acres of gold-level Louisiana Certified Habitat in Sunset.  

topic- plant it and they will come

I will explain how native plants attract wildlife to even tiny, urban yards and will feature photography and tips from local wildlife photographers.

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Ted Jackson

bio

Ted Jackson is a photojournalist, writer and public speaker who has spent over three decades exploring the human condition while covering news, sports and features for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He joined the newspaper in 1984 after two years photographing in the heart of Acadiana. He is a native of McComb, Mississippi, and studied art design, journalism and photojournalism at Southwest Mississippi Junior College and the University of Southern Mississippi.

In 1987, he photographed his first major photo essay, “Desire, Death of a Dream,” an essay on life in the Desire housing development, one of the country’s worst. Other major projects have included the opening of the Berlin Wall, the Persian Gulf War, life in Cuba and political upheaval in Haiti. In 2003, he photographed “LEAP Year,” where he documented one eighth-grade class through their year as they prepared for high-stakes school testing.

In 1997, he was one of a four-person team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for “Oceans of Trouble,” a comprehensive look at the impending collapse of the world’s fisheries. Through the years, he has covered the physical destruction and emotional trauma of earthquakes and hurricanes, most notably, Hurricane Katrina. For their coverage of Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune staff won a Pulitzer for public service and another for breaking news.

Ted and his wife, Nancy, live in Covington, La.

Topic - banquet speaker - the power of photography

My forty-two-year career in photojournalism has given me a front row seat to history: the opening of the Berlin Wall, War in the Middle East, Hurricane Katrina, the Saints Super Bowl win, as well as the endless variety of Louisiana life. My camera has also served as a passport to forbidden worlds. But more importantly, photography has introduced me to the human heart.

Thirty-four years ago, a “chance encounter" with a homeless man challenged my understanding of compassion and opened my eyes to the power of photography. These are the photographs and stories that I love to share.

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