After spending a great weekend in Carmel (pictures soon), I drove down to San Diego to attend the OneLight Workshop on Tuesday. OneLight is a workshop taught by Zack Arias on maximizing the potential of one-flash lighting. He started this workshop with this Edward Weston quote:

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don’t know what to do with it.

Hard-core, eh? Yeah, this workshop was all about nuts and bolts, f-stops, apertures, shutter speed, control, control, control. It’s actually kind of fun being around a bunch of photographers throwing out all these geeky numbers and stuff. I cannot recommend this workshop enough to any photographer who really wants to have more control of their gear and want to be inspired to learn as much about light as possible. Here are some of my shots from the day - some of them are natural light and some of them are flash lit.

For those curious, our awesome clients for the day were 2000 Olympic Archer Karen Scavotto and singer/songwriter Josh Damigo.

I’m having to jump all over the place in terms of blogging because I’m realizing that some things are just easier to blog than others. =) Before the WPPI events, I was actually in downtown Las Vegas for the Antiworkshop with awesome instructors and some amazing photographers from all over the world. One of the workshop activities was being given a list of techniques and situations to capture, going out with a team of photographers and really cool models, and then putting together a collection to show. I got to shoot with Emily, Alli, and Scott, and here are some of my pictures of Mark and Yessenia (who rocked, by the way).

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On a personal note, I learned so much from Doug, Chenin and John Michael on this trip. It’s incredible to grow and develop as a photographer… and even better to do it alongside other passionate photographers. When I was going to yoga, I had an instructor who would say “You learn the skills and techniques so that you can then fully express.” I think of that often when it comes to photography. All the stuff about lighting, shutter-speed, f-stop - they are all just means to new avenues of expression.