Elective: Travel Preparation for Digital Photographers Workshop
Saturday
Photoworks Studio
3/14/26
-
3/14/26
Date
8:30 AM
-
12:00 PM
Time
Price
$95
Duration
1
About the Course
You'll learn the best practices for traveling with your digital camera - how to protect your images, your equipment and your sanity! We'll discuss where redundancy is a must, and how to plan ahead for all contingencies. We'll demonstrate tools that get you to the right locations at the right time to capture the best images possible. Minimum age 18. More Info: asislen@glenechophotoworks.org
Traveling to photograph, either as the primary or secondary reason for your trip can be either very frustrating or truly pleasurable. It all begins with planning. Is this primarily a photography trip or a for leisure, or both. Are you traveling to participate in a photographic workshop, or with a group of friends who have little interest in photography. Digital photography has tremendous benefits when traveling, but there are also the questions of laptops, extra batteries, memory cards, image backups, etc. Compare this to my first trip to Africa over 40 years ago, with 120 rolls of film in lead bags that security at Heathrow insisted on opening and putting every unprotected roll through the X-ray machine! I didn't know if all my film had been ruined until I returned home and had the film developed!
Times have changed, but preparing ahead of time is still critical.
We'll discuss equipment insurance, what equipment MUST have redundancy, how to manage and protect your memory cards, what emergency tools must be with you, do you travel with or without a laptop, an iPad, other storage and editing devices. There are many smartphone apps that can be incredibly helpful in both trip planning and especially once you're on site. We'll demonstrate apps like Photographer's Ephemeris, PhotoPills, Helios, various weather, radar and tide apps, etc.
If you're a Lightroom Classic user, we'll discuss whether to travel with your Lightroom catalog and laptop or other approaches to deal with your photographs when you return home. We'll show and discuss the pre-trip camera equipment checklist that I've been using for a dozen years and how it gives me the peace of mind during the hectic days of packing before I depart. The longer and more expensive the trip, the more critical all this preparation becomes! But even if it's just a weekend trip to the beach, with a little photography thrown in, planning matters.
Your Instructor
Alan Sislen
I am passionate about photography. Not just the finished photograph, but also the process of capturing, processing, and then creating the final print. I want the viewer to be moved or intrigued by what they see, regardless of whether their reaction is exactly the same as what motivated me to press the shutter release. Through my photographs I am showing what I saw, but more importantly, what I felt.
The writer uses words; the musician uses musical notes. My goal is to present images that stimulate more than our visual sense, but to also evoke emotion and imagination. While I use the most modern photographic equipment and software, my style and approach to photography are traditional, driven by my photographic vision.
My greatest influences have been those with whom I have studied, including well-known British landscape photographer Charlie Waite, former National Geographic legend Bruce Dale, digital expert Thom Hogan, fine art image processing and printing experts Eliot Cohen, Charlie Cramer, John Paul Caponigro, Julia Anna Gospodarou and darkroom master John Sexton.