Tuscany, 2007

Friday, October 12 (evening) through Sunday, October 14, 2007

A weekend in beautiful Chianti country at the Castello di Lamole near Greve, only 30 minutes from Florence, studying and photographing with world-renowned photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee.

This workshop begins on Friday evening and will run through late Sunday afternoon.  

In this workshop we will show you how to make better photographs, to help you see more, and thus experience more personal growth. If the experience of their past workshop participants is any guide, you will be off and at running toward making better photographs and making them more consistently.

This workshop is so complete that it will be the last workshop of its type that you will ever need. Even though this is only a weekend workshop, everything will be covered including developing film by inspection, printing, and use of the camera in a way that encourages endless visual possibilities and creative vision. All technical matters will be discussed as a function of vision.

Our objective is to help you develop your visual and creative skills and give you the tools to make the best photographs you possibly can. We will try to teach you everything we know about the fine art of black and white photography, both visually and technically. We have no secrets.

There are no limits to what we are willing to help you with as they try to meet your needs as fully as possible. The principles covered are applicable to all formats, although view cameras will used for demonstration purposes.

Workshop participants will be offered discounts on all of our books and photographs during the workshop.

For full particulars about the workshop, call 610-847-2005, or send an email to michaelandpaula@michaelandpaula.com. For questions about the Castello di Lamole contact Francesco Arese Visconti at aresevisconti@web.de.

Workshop Fee: 650 Euros. Payment can be made in dollar equivalent to Smith/Chamlee Photography or in Europe to Francesco Arese Visconti . A deposit of 100 Euros will hold your place. Food and lodging are included. The workshop is limited to eight participants.

Each workshop begins on Friday evening at 7P.M. It will continue from 9:00 A.M. Saturday until well into the night, and on Sunday from about 9:30 A.M. until approximately 4:00 P.M.

On Friday evening, after dessert and tea and coffee, a time when we can begin to get to know each other, we take a preliminary look at your photographs followed by a discussion of our own work and the things that go into its making.

On Saturday morning after breakfast we go into the darkroom for a printing demonstration. We demonstrate our printing techniques and then apply them to negatives you have brought with you. We ask that you bring negatives that were difficult to print, negatives that yielded satisfactory prints only after many hours of effort, or ones that never did yield the print you had hoped for. Also bring the best prints (mounted or not) that you were able to make from those negatives. Since we do not have an enlarger, we can only do this with negatives that do not need to be enlarged.

After a break for lunch we take our cameras into the field and demonstrate how we work. During this time we work with each person individually and demonstrate a creative way to use a camera that will, in all likelihood, expand your way of working. Although we will be using an 8x10 camera for this demonstration, this is valuable even if you work in 35mm. During this afternoon there will be time for you to make your own negatives, so bring your camera and film.

In the evening we demonstrate developing film by inspection. There will not be time for you to develop your own negatives you might have made that day.

We then have a large and leisurely dinner and general discussion into the night.

On Sunday morning we take a careful look at your photographs and discuss them in light of all that has gone before during the weekend. Our hope is that by this time you will almost be able to anticipate everything we might say. The more photographs you bring with you, the more helpful we can be. Bring as many as you would like us to look at, though thirty or forty would be maximum. These photographs should be in as finished a form as possible and preferably mounted.

We look at participants' photographs both before and after brunch. At the end of the workshop, we can cover any topic you like that we have not dealt with. Let us know if there is any specific aspect of photography, either technical or visual, that you are interested in having us cover and we will do our best to do so.