The Artful Garden
with Lev L. Spiro
Online registration for this program has closed. To check availability, find out about future dates, or if you would like further information, please call 505-983-1400 ext. 111. Also, get the SFW E-Newsletter for updates!
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Course Description
Learn exciting new ways to bring your garden photography to the next level with this three-week online workshop led by award-winning fine-art photographer and filmmaker Lev L. Spiro. Story and emotion are the keys to Lev’s impassioned approach to the natural world in your garden and beyond, as he guides you to harness not only light, focus, and composition, but also embrace gesture, metaphor, ambiguity, and narrative, to create meaning and forge powerful connections between your work and the viewer.
You discover new techniques to tell story through the use of motion and perspective and broaden your understanding of how to best employ different types of light, focus, and composition. Along the way we learn about conceptual and intuitive approaches to photography and how to benefit from each, how to work a subject, and we are inspired by Lev’s presentations on both classic and contemporary photographers of the genre. Lev gently encourages you to experiment, embrace mistakes and learn from them, and expand your photographic and artistic vocabulary.
Whether you want to create botanical fine art pieces or simply make your garden images more unusual, compelling, and delightful, Lev presents you with the tools to move beyond simple representation of a subject so that your work truly embodies artistic and creative vision. Your garden photography will never be the same!
Additional Information
WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
What You Should Know:
Working knowledge of digital workflow and manual mode on your digital SLR or mirrorless camera. Participants must be able to download and select images using image editing software for class sessions.
Policies:
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
Categories
about
Lev L. Spiro is a lens-based artist whose work explores the duality of light and darkness, evoking the natural world as both sacred and indifferent—at once a place of solace and a realm of mystery. His images navigate these paradoxes, finding grace in shadow and disquiet in the sublime, forming meditations on spirit, survival, and the fragile poetry of existence.
Lev’s fine-art photography has been featured in solo exhibitions at A. Smith Gallery in Austin, TX, and La Bottega Gallery in Laguna Beach, CA, and juried into more than 70 national and international exhibitions, including PH21 Gallery, Praxis Gallery, the SE Center for Photography, and the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel. His work has appeared in Dodho, Shadow & Light, F-Stop, All About Photo, Black & White, and Art Ascent (Gold Artist, September 2025 & June 2021).
Before turning his full focus to fine-art photography, Lev directed more than 150 productions for film and television, including Orange Is the New Black, The O.C., Modern Family, and Weeds—a cinematic foundation which continues to inform his photographic practice through an emphasis on atmosphere, emotion, and the expressive power of light.
Lev teaches the popular courses The Artful Garden, Story & Emotion in the Natural World, and now Thin Places: Photography and the Sacred in Nature. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he continues to teach, photograph, and explore the ways light, time, and perception shape our experience of the natural world.
Website: levlspiro.com
Instagram: @llspiro
