I led three in-the-field trips in addition to having a booth at the festival headquarters (shown below).
David McRee writes the Beachunter Blog, and is the official blogger of the Festival. He wrote a nice piece about me, the link is here http://www.blogthebeach.com/2010/space-coast-birding-festival/robert-amoruso-photography-workshops-space-coast-birding-festival. Be sure to read earlier and later entries on the blog for more about the Festival and you’ll see why it’s becoming one of the best Birding and Wildlife festivals in the country. David also posted interviews from the festival. You can see mine here http://www.blogthebeach.com/2010/space-coast-birding-festival/people-i-met-at-the-space-coast-birding-wildlife-festival about 3 minutes into the video.
I also filmed a walk-through of my booth using my wife Cindy’s Flip Video and posted it to my Facebook page here:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?v=app_2392950137&ref=name&id=100000369982583.
My three workshops had a total of 35 persons attending. I made it a point to talk to each and everyone one of them while shooting, determining how I could help them, looking at what they were doing, making suggestions, setting up cameras, you name it I did it. The skill levels ran the gambit but I worked hard to make sure everyone was happy and came away with some great images.
After each workshop concluded, I asked everyone how I did. Did I meet your expectations? The responses were a resounding YES. I mention this because this is an important aspect of my workshops. I want to make sure it meets and preferably exceeds your expectations.
My booth at the 2010 Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival.
As many of the attendees where using lenses in the 100-400mm range, part of my instruction centered around making pleasing images of birds in the environments by choosing atrractive backgrounds and composing the image using geometric relationships such as leading lines, diagonals, triangles and the like.
Those with super telephoto lenses received instruction in long lens technique, for those with flash and better beamers – instruction in fill-flash or flash as main light, and I let those with Canon cameras use my 600mm lens.
I received some kind comments by email I would like to share:
From Dorothy; Dear Robert, Thank you again for the wonderful field trip at the Festival last week. It was a wonderful learning experience and I appreciate your great helpful tips. I attached a photo that I took. Thank you again.
From Dorothy on my Facebook Wall: Hi, Robert, am attaching a photo that I took at your workshop…Your pointers were so good…Thank you for allowing me to use one of your flash attachments…Am very pleased with the results…
That photo below was created by Dorothy using a flash and some well-placed soaring gulls – a technique I can teach you on a workshop.
From Don;
I just wanted to thank you for the Workshop this morning. But of even of more value was the time that you spent with me going over Image Size, Resolution, Sampling, and Bicubic at your booth. Tonight I had time to work on it and I took one of the images that I took this morning and made it 16 X 24 and in my haste forgot to sharpen it. I cropped it as you suggested and set the resolution to 360. I then went and checked the resample box and bicubic smoother and printed it (I have an Epson 2200 and it only enlarges to 13 X 19 so I printed only a portion of it). I was totally amazed at how sharp it came out – I have been smiling ever since.
I have been reading books, asking pros and doing everything that I could think of to improve the quality of my enlargements and frankly I was getting pretty discouraged, especially when I heard people talking about making enlargements up to 30 X 40 inches. But in 20 minutes you opened up a new door for me and now I am really excited about getting out and shooting more photos. This will without a doubt be the most rewarding day of our 4 month stay in Florida for me.
I know that you have more important things to do than read e-mails, but I just cannot thank you enough for your time, patience and expertise. I am forever grateful.
I am so glad that I was able to help Don and Dorothy and all the other on the workshops. T0 those of you that signed up for my newsletter and are reading this, thank you.
by admin
no comments