The Junction courses are about to wrap up, and although there are many photos and stories to share, getting to sleep four hours every night is catching up on us! So, I’ll just share a shot of my class, the A-Team! I ended up with four in the videography course, and they are working their butts off! We paired up with Wyman Meinzer’s photography course for 95 percent of the shoots, and hopefully I’ll have images up from the flash flood we caught today soon!

With that, more to come! Enjoy the action above!

Our first and second day at Junction saw us shooting quite a bit of flower work. The rain has come pretty regularly, and we take advantage of the overcast skies by shooting on a macro level. I’m engrossed in high-speed sync flash work again, and I’m finding a few inhabitants along the way. Macro work is such a great exercise in patience and creativity, not to mention technique: FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS!

We do not go without having fun though! Macro videography can put you on the narrative level of an otherwise inconspicuous creature. Below is a few quick shots of a caterpillar my class named Tim…

Have Sixteen Legs, Will Travel from Jerod Foster on Vimeo.

More to come. We shot a cattle branding today on the Llano River Ranch, and we even had a student participate! I might even have a video of the high-speed sync flash work up later…

Early mornings and late nights, little sleep, and awesome light! Wyman Meinzer and I are back in Junction, and over the next 15 days, I’ll try to keep the site posted with little asides from our adventures with 15 college students, all of them here to dive deep in visual creativity! It’s an extremely productive two weeks, and the most gratifying aspect of the trip is to see the transformation many students undergo with their craft and passion! Annually, we see Texas Tech students, as well as students from across the nation (literally, non-traditional as well) come away with new, or re-newed, senses of their abilities, confidence, aesthetic, and general vigor for shooting!

Look for more on the site in the next several days! I received the Zoom H4n today, and just playing around with it for a little bit has completely blown me away in terms of sound quality! I’ll have more to post on this nice piece of multimedia gear later!

The above shot was the first thing I saw this morning as I was walking around campus! More to come!

When I posted last about James Watkins’s hands, it struck me that most of the posts regarding lighting and photoshoots (in my world at least) revolve around using some sort of artificial lighting technology. I love using lights, and if you’ve read this blog enough, you’ll know that I’m a diligent user of several gonzo-sized sticks of dynamite-like photons, er, I mean studio and flash strobe systems.

What doesn’t get paid its due in this world of gear, gear, and more gear, are those times when “lights” aren’t needed. Take for example the photograph in the previous post. Uninhibited by gear, I was left able to just simply find the light. Although it doesn’t present itself to be as simple as we all would really want, when you do find it, you’re more likely to find it later! I was shooting an assignment for a magazine on the art classes held every summer in Junction, and I spent a great deal of time working in the pottery class, taking advantage of the beautiful, directionally diffused light coming in through the screen windows (below is a shot of the interior of the studio where the class was working). The shot in the previous posts, as well as the one above and one below were taken of Mr. Watkins in the right-hand corner of the building you see here. Non-directional light flowing in from everywhere, and the highlight kicker touching his hands came from the window to which he was sitting closest.

Directionally diffused lighting that occurs naturally offers soft, wrapping light that is more subdued in intensity, giving your camera (and you) a break in dynamic range limitations. The values in the shadows and highlights come a bit closer, and you’re able to capture detail in both areas more easily as opposed to shooting outside in direct sunlight at high noon (blech). In essence, it’s a naturally occurring softbox or scrim.

And this light rocks! It can be soft and subdued, or even more dramatic, particularly when it is more directional, such as the shot below taken in the evening. Notice that nice highlight on the artist’s hands.

Basically, this light is coming from behind and nearly level (in terms of the sun) with the window it is passing through. That nice, warm evening light makes everything dramatically tangible, and it’s something that many folks using artificial lights strive to recreate! Hats off to those who do!

So there, it’s always a good practice to review the light given to you naturally, particularly if you’re on assignment and needing to move faster than your assistant (or yourself). In this case, I don’t think artificial lighting would have done this work any justice, especially given the subject and his artwork!

I probably have this in a previous post (no doubt a failure of my memory), but I just wanted to post one of my favorite shots taken over the past few years. These are artist James Watkins’s hands. I have an upcoming Field Lighting post generated around this shot and a few portraits of this great ceramicist, but I thought I would go ahead and show this one. I just love the light, the texture, the work taking place, the solidarity of the subject, and the combination of a moving and a still subject play in tandem to make this image come together for me!

Hands are so important to many craftsmen/women and artists. For this reason, I’ll always consider this one of my best portraits!

Please provide any interpretation of the shot that you feel like…

That’s right, an HD video/documentary course, in Junction, Texas, Texas Tech University satellite campus, May 12 – May 27. If you are frequent readers, you know I’m a photography instructor (of sorts) at Texas Tech University, and for five years now, I have been teaching a field photography course with Wyman Meinzer at the Junction, Texas, campus. This year, we’ve decided to test out a new course in high-definition video. I’m basing it off of the foundations of the photography course, which is “get your feet wet working like a professional.” For 15 days, students and instructors alike work tirelessly, pursuing the story of the land and the people on it. Each year is a treat, finding ourselves with a new bunch of students and some familiar and veteran areas of the state to point our lenses. We travel well over 1,000 miles during our 15 days, and we see a lot of country. If the video/documentary course turns out anything like the photography course, and it should (we’re going along with them), then it’s bound to be a challenging, yet inspiring, experience for all parties involved.

If there’s anything that can be said about our classes in Junction, it’s one of the only times you can receive that much one-on-one mentoring for the price (which by the way, is a great deal more affordable than other workshops). Also, you don’t have to be a TTU student now to take the course (that’s right, this is sort of a pitch). However, before you sign up, you will have to submit an application to Tech, a formality, to be enrolled in the course. If anything (if you have a degree or not), you’ll get three hours of college credit in 15 days. How cool is that!?

If you’re interested, please shoot me an e-mail. I’m sure there’s some technical details I left out, but I can dig up anything!

Here’s a little blues music for floating the river…

River Run, by Jerod Foster from Jerod Foster on Vimeo.

Each year, I get to co-teach a 15-day photography workshop in Junction, Texas, at Texas Tech University’s satellite campus. Wyman Meinzer and I guide 12 students in to some of the most pristine parts of the state, including areas around Mason, Austin, Utopia, Sonora, Langtry, and further west toward the Big Bend! Much of that time, we spend in the water, sometimes up to our neck, and once or twice, a camera has been dropped (one by yours truly). Not many people beyond the students get to see this river land that we shoot once a year, so I thought I would whip up a quick video to showcase some of the water we so diligently work over with our eyes while we are there during the spring. The rivers we primarily shoot on include the Llano River and the Devil’s River, both of which offer a unique image!

P.S. To see the video in high-definition, just click through and watch it on its Vimeo page.

Enjoy!

I’m starting to think that those folks that blog everyday either a) have a lot of time on their hands, b) are making direct advertising monies (yes, monies) from their blog hits (just check out Strobist, great blog), c) are always at a computer, or d) love what they do, and see the benefit in providing information about said occupation. I think I fit in to the last selection, however, I don’t blog everyday due to the lack of selection A and B, and I would rather not participate in C.

That being said, I apologize for not keeping the posts updated through the past two weeks while Wyman Meinzer and I led a group of students all over the Texas Hill Country and out in to the desert. A typical day for us was wake up at 5:45 a.m., gone by 6:15 a.m., shoot until the light became pretty anemic on some of the most beautiful places in the state, head back to the campus and arrive at approximately one hour before lunch, take a quick break from the photographs, edit a bit, head back out at 4:30 p.m., photograph again until our hearts were content, sometimes stretching in to early morning, get back to campus anywhere between midnight and 2:00 a.m., then start over at 5:45 a.m. All of our students this year allowed us positive attitudes and strong work ethics, even in light of lack of sleep and sometimes with nothing more than a gas station burrito for nourishment (come to think of it, I was probably the only one that ate the burritos).

Nevertheless, we did shoot, and I mean SHOOT. We visited some magnificent areas that over the years Wyman has researched at included in many of his book projects. He has taught the class for ten years now, and fortunately, I have acted as a TA or co-insructor for the past five years. This is such a great opportunity for students to really see what we do professionally, and the best thing about it is they are doing it with us. There is no definite line drawn between all-powerful instructor and measly amateur students (like some workshops I have read horror stories from), rather, we are all in the trenches together, tossing around ideas, critiqueing them, and then photographing what we come up with. Wyman and I are there to fascilitate, and provide professional advice, but we are definitely not squashing ideas to make sure students are shooting only one way.

The images here are only a few of many that I will be posting about the trip. We all took some inspirational photographs, and if not for anything, they will provide good fodder for the blog posts. However, as we tell the students, all the images that we take and edit are useable beyond social media. I hope this happens for those students that came along on the bogus adventure we had at TTU Junction, 2009!

Flowers on Mason Mountain, one of the places we take students on our 15-day photo field trip!

Alright! Wyman and I are back at Texas Tech University in Junction, our OTHER place, ha! Each year, Wyman and I come to Junction to lead a 15-day photography workshop that counts as class credit with the university, and each year, we get a totally new batch of eager students who get to see some of the most beautiful locations in the state! The course is unlike almost all photo workshops out there, due to the time spent shooting and the intense pace that we lead it.

To keep everyone abreast, I will be blogging periodically while down here, getting in to some technical information, aesthetics, history, and mischief that we get ourselves wrapped around! We’re finishing up preparing our classroom, which we just use as a storage locker basically for the mounds of gear we bring every year, and we’re up early in the morning! More to come!