Seeing the world as a photograph- A workshop with Joseph Podlesnik

Phoenix, AZ. January 8-11th 2018.

I think I've mentioned in a previous blog post, that my journey into the craft of photography "officially" started more or less a year ago (I had taken pictures before but not with the intent of developing it as a craft). So then I jumped head first into taking pictures, from the experience of taking/publishing photos, I started to develop the need to educate myself further in different areas the craft.

One such area was learning what other photographers were doing or have done in the past. Before this I had taken an Art History course or two in college but photography was briefly mentioned, so I really had no historical points of reference to get started with. Luckily my wife, who is a painter here in Phoenix, had mentioned to me a couple of photographers in the area that their work might interest me and so I discovered Joseph's work.

He has a background as an artistic painter, and has extensively taught art and design. This is evident in his photographs as his approach to photography transcends objects and his images resemble a painting more than a photograph. I had known already I wanted to generate that same feeling in my photographs, that "This feels like a painting" reaction, but had no firm idea how to achieve this other than through trial and error. As such Joseph's work spoke to me directly, as I found in his work something I had intuitively tried to grasp, but hadn't been able to consistently materialize in my photography. So when I first learned Joseph was offering a workshop at the Scottsdale Artist's School, my curiosity was naturally piqued.

The workshop we underwent under Joseph's instruction, was a type of conjugation on the two things I knew I had to work on more this year: a) advancing my competence in achieving a painting quality to photographs and b) expanding my awareness of other photographers as a whole, and Joseph not only made design and visual unity a main focus of the workshop, but he also intertwined it with examples of historical photographers' images.

2018 for me, is going to be a more purposeful year regarding my photography as I have developed very concrete goals to improve my technical knowledge: I want to outgrow my current camera by the end of this year; but I also needed to develop some direction in these other more subjective areas.

The workshop came at a good time to help me formulate specific tasks I can seek in order to improve my composition and design in my photography, and I already have several photographers to further research and discover.

Thanks Joseph, it was a true pleasure and very insightful being able to attend your workshop.

Here are some of the photographs that I took during this workshop: