We are so happy and proud of all of the women who attended the Discovery Workshop with us. We asked all of the participants to send us some of their final images so we could post them onto a website for all to see. We are still awaiting a few entries, but most of them are now online.

Check it out HERE!

We set up the next part of the day as a classroom breakout sessions. Each of the instructors took on teaching an intensive 45 minutes class on a photographic area of interest. MeRa taught one-on-one marketing and a website critique for anyone that attended her class; Rick went on a photographic exploration with his class, teaching them about background, texture and depth of field; Brian and Garrett took on flash lighting techniques; Matt taught organization, workflow and post production techniques, and Laura helped with branding and made vision boards with her attendees. We all enjoyed our sessions immensely and the feedback from the ladies was that they all wanted more. More time, more breakouts, more!

After our breakout classes, MeRa and Brian were able to go over their 21 tips for photographing people. All we can say is that we can’t wait to use some of their tips on our next wedding! If you want to know more about their 21 tips, you can sign up for one of their workshops!

After MeRa and Brians presentation, Garrett organized several families, couples and kids for each of the women to photograph. What a great send off! This was an opportunity for everyone to take what they had learned from the weekend and apply it to their own photography. Teams of two, three and four wandered the grounds of Cavallo Point with their subjects. It was really great to look out at all of the women sitting with their subjects, getting to know them and making portraits that were reflective of themselves as artists.

We are very excited to see all the photographs from each and every woman that attended this workshop. What a long journey it was and will continue to be for us all. We walked away from the experience wide open and thankful that we too took this journey. We stepped through dark places, worked through our own fears and emerged on the other side thankful, grateful and alive. We personally thank MeRa, Brian, Rick, Lesley, Laura, Genie, Jason and all of the 22 beautiful women that trusted us enough to embark on a self discovery journey together.

Here is a slideshow of images from this amazing weekend:

Rick then introduced us to the woman with whom he was going to demonstrate his portrait process. Her name is Lesly Robinson, a 63 year old Stinson Beach resident who owns a small catering company (she later cooked us a beautiful meal of stuffed peppers and chicken kabobs on the barbeque). Rick sat with her in front of the rest of us, speaking to her about any number of things. She talked about how much she loves her kitchen, cooking and aprons. Rick talked about how he perceived her as royalty in the way she held herself and talked. “Approachable Royalty” is how he phrased it. They talked for 20 minutes and decided they’d start working with Lesly’s apron… The shoot unfolded and the connection between Lesly and Rick became stronger and stronger despite the presence of 25 other people watching. They had fun together and it shows in the images. It seems Rick also made his way toward the royalty idea by simply using a deep (royal) blue door bathed in beautiful even light from the overcast day.

After Rick’s session, the ladies were let loose in the town of Stinson Beach. Prior to the workshop, Rick had arranged for eleven of the local residents to be subjects for the women to photograph. So, after much anticipation and nervousness, teams of two photographers each descended on the town with enthusiasm. The assignment was to make portraits that were meaningful to their subjects, based on the connecting and interview process that Rick was teaching, rather than working from preconceived ideas and projections.

Watching the women return from their assignments was rewarding and revealing. They had a new-found glow to their faces and they were radiant. We could see that this discovery experience had shifted and changed them.  The group spent an invigorating hour talking about their portraiture adventures with the characters of Stinson Beach, reflecting upon the connections that were emerging between the previous day’s self portraiture, Rick’s session with Lesly and their own shooting experience. After talking, tables were rearranged, tablecloths were put out and the fire was stoked, transforming the Community Center into a rustic dining room before the delicious barbeque meal was served. After desert, Rick took many of the women for a dusk walk down to the beach.  They were overjoyed, laughing and doing cartwheels with MeRa all the way down the misty beach as night fell.  What a wonderful way to end Day 2.

DAY ONE:

We began our journey of self discovery at Cavallo Point in Sausalito, CA. As we walked up the stairs to our classroom, we were greeted by 2 images that had a lot of meaning to the process we were about to embark on. The first image, by Lukas Felzmann, was a diptych of 2 owl wings side by side. These beautiful photographs spanned the entire landing on the staircase and it was impossible to miss.

The second image, by Arno Rafael Minkkinen, was perfectly placed at the top of the stairs. This black and white photograph was an image of a person about to jump off a cliff in the landscape.

Giant Wings… Jumping off a cliff… How appropriate. A sign of what was to come.

Day one was all about discovering ourselves through self-portraiture and introspection. A week before the workshop, Rick sent out the assignment of taking a self portrait and bringing it to the class. It was explained that we were all going to talk about what our self portrait means to us. The assignment alone brought up conflict for us and many of the participants… How are we going to photograph ourselves, portray ourselves to others and then talk about it with total strangers?

During the class, we were invited to break into groups of 5 to review our self portraits. We started with a simple but powerful process. One person would hold up their self portrait for the other 4 people in the group to look at. Then each viewer was asked to give specific feedback in the form of 3 statements: “When I look at your self portrait I see…, When I look at your self portrait I feel… and When I look at your self portrait I imagine…” The feedback was amazing to hear. Most of the observations were true to heart and some were revealing in ways that we didn’t expect. After listening to the observations, we, as the self portrait makers, told our group what the image was about. There was a lot of emotion shared during this exercise.

If you haven’t done this as a practice yet, we HIGHLY recommend it! Go do it, make a self portrait of yourself and then show it to a few people and have them tell you what they see, feel and imagine and then share with them what the image represents to you… You will be amazed.

Here are our self portraits that we presented:

Day one continued with Lesley directing everyone with a movement exercise. It started by grounding everyone to the environment and the space we were in. Than she took us on a journey that encouraged everyone to move and let any inhibitions go. We could tell that some of the participants were less than enthusiastic about moving their bodies, including ourselves. But, after the exercise, we felt a little more free to be able to express ourselves and get in touch with our ‘inner artist’. MeRa said it best… If we have a problem with moving our own bodies, how are we supposed to expect that our subjects in front of the camera will be free to move their bodies.

Lesley then took us through a drawing exercise. With the idea of self portraiture fresh in our minds, we were to illustrate ourselves on paper. This was a challenge for many of us! She encouraged each of us to be guided by our vision and not to second guess anything. Just start drawing and see what comes. When they were complete, we all had a chance to share our drawing and find similarities or differences between these illustrations and our original self portraits. From our drawings, we were to make 3 statements of who we are right at that moment – using the ‘what we see, feel and imagine’ from our self portraiture images. This activity for many of the participants, was very eye opening and revealing.

Here are Garrett’s:
I am running scared, looking for clarity.
I am exploring, jumping, turning… where does the time go.
I am streams of thoughts, emotional, ugly, don’t forget family.

At the end of the exercise, Lesley performed a dance/movement for everyone and we were all floored. She was beautiful.

Day 1 ended with everyone taking a personal photographic journey. The instruction was to take a new image that was reflective of the sentences which were borne out of our drawing self portraits. The idea was that we were creating a new version of a photographic self portrait, sourced from a totally different place than our original “homework” assignment. We left the day feeling like we were on the edge of a cliff, ready to jump off and fly away…listening for the new singular voice emerging from within. What a great feeling.

We just finished teaching a 3 day Photographers Discovery Workshop with Me Ra Koh, Rick Chapman, Brian Tausend, Lesley Ehrenfeld and Laura Reoch at Cavallo Point and Stinson Beach. We had a such an eye opening and emotional time with all of the 22 women that attended. We feel blessed to have been part of such a wonderful discovery weekend.

Much more to come…

I am absolutely fascinated with human ingenuity. Almost every day I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge or The Bay Bridge and I marvel at the engineering feat of these incredible structures. It is beyond my personal comprehension how we can design and engineer such amazing and sound architecture. We, often time, take it for granted.

Well, the other day, my good friend introduced me to an amazing project that began in the early 80′s called the Large Hadron Collider or the ‘LHC ‘. It is another engineering feat that absolutely blows me away! This experiment basically is attempting to fire 2 protons directly at each other at extremely high velocity, creating a mini “Big Bang”. By way of this collision, scientists hope to discover the elusive “God Particle”, a particle that we have not been able to see or prove since the theory of particle physics began. This particle is essentially the make up of all Dark Matter (basically the space between observable matter)… Now, I might be losing some of you at this point, but hang with me for a moment!

Let me help you to see how awesome this project is…

First, here are some images of the LHC to give you an idea of the scale – CLICK HERE

OK, now you see how huge this project is… So, back to the science.

A particle is so small. If you think about a grain of sand as a particle, that one single, small granule of sand consists of as many particles as all the sand on the surface of the Sahara desert, 10 feet deep……. Now that’s a lot of particles!!! – Think about it.

Now we are going to take that tiny particle (proton) and fire it at another tiny particle so that they collide. Hmmmm… Have any of you stood 50 feet across from another person and tried to simultaneously throw a ball toward each other with the hopes of hitting the balls in mid air? Well, if you haven’t, you would discover that it is really difficult. Now, take those balls and shrink them into tiny particles and shoot them at extremely high velocity 17 miles through an underground tube toward each other with hopes of those particles colliding… This is essentially what this project is trying to accomplish.

It is amazing to me that we even know this stuff!!! And now we have developed the technology to not only control and move these tiny particles, but we also have the ability to photograph, view and record them. CERN (the lab that is conducting the experiment AND who also invented the World Wide Web) has built the largest ‘lens’ on the planet, called ATLAS, to record this collision phenomenon:

This experiment doesn’t come without protest. There are many scientists that theorize that these collisions can and will produce micro black holes or dangerous subatomic particles. While CERN doesn’t discount this theory, they claim that these potential black holes would just neutralize. Other scientists claim that these black holes would simply grow and eventually consume the entire planet! I know its a bit doomsday, but we are venturing into uncharted territory and we don’t know what is Really going to happen.

In addition to finding the ‘God Particle’, physicists also believe that, by way of this collision, we may also discover extra dimensions. Now, this would be very exciting! We have been living in a 4 dimensional world – 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time. String theory actually predicts that we live in as many as 11 dimensions. If this experiment produces these extra dimensions, it would begin to prove elements of string theory and change how we view our universe and existence.

It is strange to me how this project has gone under the mainstream media radar. I know many people involved in the science community have known about this for some time, but tell me, have you heard of it?! I hadn’t until only recently and now I am a bit obsessed (as you can tell).

Today marked the very first tests of the LHC. They successfully launched the protons in both directions (clockwise and counterclockwise), without collision. They say on their website, that they will begin the collisions “in a couple of months.” I can imagine how excited these physicists must be. It truly marks a new discovery in space and time and we are about to embark on something potentially spectacular and mind blowing… But, I can’t help wondering if there won’t be any repercussions associated with this experiment… Logic dictates that messing with the Spacetime continuum may disrupt our existence as we know it.

I know that this is all very deep and difficult to understand, but there are resources out there if you are interested in learning more:

History Channel Show – Next Big Bang

Silly Informative Video

CERN Website

PETH – People for the Ethical Treatment of Hadrons (funny)

Just returned from LA and the Total Truth Tour (soon to announce tour dates). WOW, what a great group of photographers! Robert Evans, Dane Sanders, Sara France, and Carlos Baez. Nothin’ like telling the truth! Robert was very candid on how he got started and how he works today. Plus, he talked about his “collaboration” site called photographymentor.com (This site is fantastic with tons of information). Dane Sanders….he just blew me away with his take on Photography vs. Photographer (If you don’t know what I’m talking about buy his book: “Fast Track Photographer“). Sara France, I’m sooo jealous…she is sponsored by Apple (I love Apple). Sara talked about all the Apple Apps…and how well they work together. Plus, she talked about being mobile (MobileMe). Carlos Baez is an amazing fashion wedding photographer and he worked with Helmet Newton !! plus many other famous fashion photographers. I enjoyed listening to Carlos talk straight about lighting and his fashion consultant (I need someone to dress me – I’ve fallen into the GAP).

At the end of the night….who walks in….Me Ra Koh and Brian (I love them). Me Ra was there to host a WOMEN ONLY (they totally kicked me out) event: “More than Emotion: The Undercurrents of Feminine Wisdom.” I can’t tell you how that went…..but check out what Me Ra had to say.