The title of this blog is a word play I created while teaching a recent photography  workshop.  Like many other photographers who have seen revenues drop from stock photography over the past few years,  I have been trying to make up some  loss of income by teaching workshops--an activity that has left me  with decidedly mixed feelings over the years.  Fortunately,  the drop off in my business due to the recession has not been as steep as I had feared, but I have been enjoying teaching enough that I will probably continue with workshops even though I don't really need to.

While one bad workshop (which can be the result of one obnoxious participant) could make me change my mind,  my recent workshop experiences have been positive.  First, I always underestimate how much I learn myself from workshops.  Many of the aspiring photographers I'm teaching have something to teach me, either in their work, or in the realm of equipment, shooting strategies, or other aspects of the art form.  Also,  I  get a lot of pleasure out of helping a student understand some aspect of photography that's confusing, unclear, or even unknown to them.  In the Canyon Country, I enjoy seeing the positive effect the desert wilderness has on people and the heightened appreciation for its beauty and fragility that can occur.

During my last trip, I had to actually "guide"  people,  physically helping them in and out of deep canyons to our objectives.  Although I'm not an very athletic person,  I've spent so much of my life jumping around on rocks and struggling down steep trails, that I can do a pretty good job helping the "dudes"  who are new to the outback.  Also, thought I'm not a naturalist, 35 years in the desert living with the biology, geology and human history of the area has left me with a pretty good knowledge base and a retinue of stories about the Colorado Plateau.

I also noticed an interesting syndrome on the last workshop I  taught. Some of the photographers in the group were experts in cutting edge and complicated areas of digital photography like High Dynamic Range imagery.  At the same time,  previous workshop teachers had failed to explain to them some of the basics of photography and how a camera works.  One friend of mine has noticed this strange state of affairs in the young college age students he teaches on the internet.  Another friend thinks camera makers have tried to make cameras so simple to operate that they have dumbed them down and actually made using a camera correctly much harder in some ways.

A clear example is depth of field.  With a 4x5  camera, depth of field in often the easiest part of the process.  Swings and tilts make getting everything in focus quick and foolproof once you get the hang of it.  Also, those f32 and f45 stops can help gloss over minor mistakes.  When I took up 35mm photography I was gobsmacked to learn that the hyperfocal distance scales, which gave us a quick and easy way to maximize depth of field back in the day,  were gone.  Now, photographers are supposed to use autofocus for landscapes, which many times does not work well at all. Many photographers are even surprised to learn that the depth of field they see through the viewfinder is not the depth of field they get when they stop the lens down.   Only about one of five of my recent workshop participants clearly understood how and where to maximize depth of field.  For myself, I've taken to carrying around a depth of field scale chart to help in the field. I'm sure there's an app for that, and indeed there is, available for Iphones.

I suppose it is only a matter of time until digital cameras will learn to always focus at the hyperfocal distance if told to, and that will be great. I love the peace of mind and the control over exposure that histograms give us, but they are also a simple tool that aspiring photographers often do not  know how to correctly use.  The fact that histograms on the camera and histograms of the scene in Lightroom sometimes do not always seems to agree (I'm not sure if this is possible, but it seems to be happening sometimes for me), doesn't help any and may erode confidence in the camera histogram's results.

This weekend finds me teaching another workshop, and with thanks to my students, I'd like to share a couple of the questions I'm getting, along with my answers.  One workshop participant was concerned that members of his camera club had maintained that using wide angle lenses was "lazy" photography,  and that it would be more creative to use the longer focal lengths most of the time for more creative intimate landscapes and detail shots.  My response to this is that  every outdoor photographer should use the entire arsenal of lens focal lengths available. I see nothing easy about using wide angles lenses--in fact getting good imagery with a wide angle may be harder than with  longer lenses.  With a wide angle,  sky conditions and foreground objects become critical.  Not just any foreground or sky will do.  The foreground must be interesting and lead the viewer into the scene,  if sky is included,  I strongly prefer interesting clouds or weather.   Using the wide angle effectively shouldn't rule out out using the other focal lengths.  I think the trick is to access a shooting situation on every level and bracket ideas in differing focal lengths.  A good scene will have a lot to give no matter what lens you put on the camera, and if time permits all options should be considered.   Many professionals strive to get a different look in their imagery by using the extremes of focal length, and amateurs can try this too.

Another totally unrelated question I got was "How days a year are you in the field?"  Over the years the number has varied,  reaching a minimum when my kids were in high school.  I'm proud to say I missed very few of the hundreds of athletic contests they were involved with.  When my kids were young and traveling with me,  I sometimes spent up to 300 days a year in the field, bolstered by the nearly continuous summer trips we did in a pop-up camper, covering all the lower 48 states and Hawaii, and some overseas trips as well.  This year  I will be out about 200 days,  mostly in the Southwest and in foreign locations.  I've decided these are two geographic areas I want to focus on at the end of my career--the four corners states and interesting places in other countries.

I just received two thank you emails from photographers in my last workshop, which makes my day.  Also, one the participants told me he was more likely to listen to my b.s. because I'm a "master."  I don't know about the last part,  but workshops are more fun and more productive when students respect the teacher, so perhaps by pure longevity, I've gained guru status.  It's good to be the king.