Updated 17 November 2024
Welcome to our studio and virtual classroom:
The challenges and opportunities facilitated through digital technology can be absolutely fascinating and equally infuriating. So how can we keep up with such rapid change? What don’t we know but need to understand? What new skills are required? And where do we even begin? In answering such questions we find it helpful to distinguish between those intellectual skills that enable us to engage and understand, and the practical skills that facilitate our creativity and realise our dreams and desires.
The intellectual skills tend to be quickly acquired, for example over a weekend or two, but the practical skills take much longer. This is why we offer such a broad range of educational programs, from one-on-one mentoring to studio workshops to week-long residential courses. Each serves a different purpose and caters for different needs.
All our endeavours aim to promote understanding, control, and masterful accomplishment instead of stylised clicks and instant unmediated ‘solutions’.
Workshops:
Our Workshops are attended via Streamed On-Demand delivery so the course material can be studied in your own time and at your own pace in the comfort and familiarity of your own working environment, equipment and images. Plus there are no travel, accommodation or additional costs and enrolments are not constrained by ‘the number of seats around the table’.
And being in your own working environment and working with your own equipment and images ensures you are immediately applying the workshop’s content and revelations to your practice.
Detailed course outlines and booking details are on each Workshop webpage or by clicking on the titles in our Education Calendar which lists our follow-up Tutorial dates, and for additional information please see our FAQ (Education).
The cost per person per workshop is AUS $330 (includes all fees and charges) and is payable by Credit/Debit Card, PayPal, or Direct EFT.
Tutorials:
Our Tutorials Live Streamed on YouTube (from January 2025) are an opportunity to go over and clarify the course content and answer any follow-up questions from our workshop attendees. And while each tutorial will ‘focus’ on a specific workshop, other questions and topics are always welcome.
The tutorials are scheduled every Sunday from 10.30am to 12.30pm AEDT/AEST and everyone is welcome to attend.
Our aim is to share, translate and adapt our extensive research, state-of-the-art equipment, workflows, libraries, and archives to inspire, support and facilitate your practice, production skills, scholarship, and creative ambitions.
Consultations:
Our Consultations are via ZOOM and can be scheduled at anytime in any time zone, and provide an exceptional opportunity to refine specific areas of your personal, professional and creative practice including unique and specialist content, or in greater depth and a more focused manner than can usually be realised elsewhere.
Regular consultations support large scale projects such as exhibition preparation, or holistic artistic development through a personalised mentoring program, while individual consultations on a ‘need-to-know’ basis provide quick solutions to immediate questions or problems. Post graduate and post doctoral research project supervision, including grant applications, research proposals, reviews and audits are also regular outcomes.
The cost of a private consultation is AUS $220/hr (includes all fees and charges) and is charged by the 1/4 hour. Typical consultations vary between one to two hours, but are capped at a maximum cost of AUS $350 to ensure what needs to be covered is adequately addressed without the ‘time taken’ getting in the way.
Photography Residencies:
Since 2003 we have also presented photography retreats such as our annual eight day Daintree workshop at the James Cook University DRO Research Station at Cape Tribulation in Nth Queensland, or at James Cook University’s Orpheus Island Research Station on the Great Barrier Reef. We also present week long residencies each year at our Heidelberg Studio including 24/7 access to our production facilities and onsite accommodation. They are all unique experiences generously supported by our many sponsors who also attend and supply ‘state-of-the-art’ equipment, knowledge and materials for all our creative photography needs, from printers, ink and paper, to medium format cameras, specialist lenses, drones, graphics monitors, photo books and their expertise in all things photographic.
How to Proceed:
Begin by categorising or grouping your requirements into areas of interest. This helps prevent being overwhelmed by the possibilities and opportunities, while also identifying your most pressing concerns. And not just your practical skills, but also where your understanding and confidence is strong, or not. And while our workshops provide the best ‘value’ sometimes a short consultation on a specific topic can save both time and money, especially if you work best in a one-on-one environment.
For example, if you are looking to improve your digital camera and creative capture skills, then our Knowing and Loving your Camera short course would be ideal. But if you are already ‘camera competent’ and want to prepare and print your own images, then our Digital Printing workshop is the perfect introduction – we even custom profile your printer and favourite paper for you!
Or if you are already printing your own images and are happy with your paper selection and print to screen matching, but are seeking even more refined and utterly spectacular prints, then our Crafting a Digital Print workshop is designed for you.
On the other hand, if you can’t quickly locate specific images, or identify different versions of the same image, or are unsure if their storage and backups are safe and reliable, our Cataloguing and Archiving workshop will help you look after yourself as well as your precious images.
Perhaps you want to break out of the limitations and frustrations of an Adobe workflow? Then our Affinity Photo and 3DLUT Creator and Capture One Workflows workshops will ‘change your life’ by profoundly advancing your pictorial understanding, editing, and imaging skills through state-of-the-art professional software and ‘first-principles’ based workflows.
When your passion is the classic BW photograph, our The BW Digital Image workshop will not only extend your personal and historical interest, but also profoundly improve your entire workflow from pre-visualisation to capture, editing and printing.
However if you want to delve deeper into the physics, psychology, and ontology of colour – to understand it, work with it, represent it, manipulate it, and ensure accurate and correct colour when and where you need it – then our Colour Artistry workshop is not to be missed.
Or if you are seeking more meaning and creative purpose in your pictures, especially with a deeper understanding of how pictures ‘capture hearts and minds’ independently of their subject, then our Understanding Pictures and/or Exhibition Practice and/or Thinking Photography workshops will be incredibly informative and inspiring.
And these are just a few of our many offerings.
Working with us will also provide an overview of the opportunities that lie ahead, where learning what you do-and-don’t know helps identify not only what is most pressing in your current workflow, but also where you can quickly make the biggest improvements in your practice, understanding, and confidence.
Our EDUCATION CALENDAR summarises upcoming events while online bookings and payments are available via the links on each workshop page.
WORKSHOPS FAQ TESTIMONIALS CONSULTATIONS
Dr Les Walkling
Andrey Walkling