Editing with Intention
with Don Werthmann
January 11 – February 1, 2025
Course Description
Learning image editing, sequencing, syncopation, and other strategies to organize what you’ve created requires time to stop, look, and listen to yourself think. These pivotal skills enable the development of ideas about what a body of work means to you, let alone what it might convey to your viewers. If you’re seeking for ways to make your visual art meaningful, then learning how to edit with intention is the best place to start.
Lens-based artist Don Werthmann offers his original book of photography, To Think Outloud: The Collection of Visual Poems for Visual Literacy, as an in-depth example to teach this online workshop. Don reveals the evolution of a project idea that spans fifteen years including Lightroom workflows, self-imposed editing rules & rationales, and ideas for adapting a collection of images for different presentations, without forfeiting intentions.
After an introduction to the concepts, workflows, and goals, you practice numerous editing tasks with their own images and objectives guiding them. Each workshop session offers time for us to screen share our image collections, obtain important aesthetic feedback, and encouragement to move forward. Small break-out sessions and an individual final review offer an experience that can garner important insights and opinions about organizing your work and taking it to the next level of development. The editing journey is the destination, and it is an incredibly rewarding process to organize a body of work for presentation to sophisticated viewing audiences such as editors or art buyers, on a website or social media platform, for a printed and framed exhibition, a portfolio review event, or even a self-published book.
Join Don and a small group of serious photographers from across the country to explore the creative process of learning to edit your work with intention. You will never view your photography in the same way after these four insightful Saturdays together.
Additional Information
WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
What You Should Know:
Participants are required to have an existing and functional Adobe Lightroom catalog, proficient with image import and export, and basic navigation of the Library Module. Discovering that you might want to produce and/or process new images is certainly plausible during these workshop weeks, but those are not our priorities. Camera operation and related technical abilities are not required. Bring work already produced.
Special Notes:
Class will meet 9:30 – 11:30 am (Mountain Time) on Saturdays starting January 11 and ending February 1 (four online group sessions). Enrollment is limited to 12 participants.
Zoom Video Conferencing software (available for no charge from Zoom.com) will be used to facilitate the class sessions. Further details will be emailed to registrants.
Santa Fe Workshops always aims to produce a high-quality experience for our online attendees. That said, variables including regional and local internet provider speeds, traffic on Zoom's servers, and your own computing hardware can contribute to a less than ideal streaming event. While we do our best to minimize the impact of these variables, they are outside the control of Santa Fe Workshops.
Policies:
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
For the convenience of participants, recordings of each class session are posted privately for one month after the end of each session. Santa Fe Workshops takes the recordings down after one month to protect the intellectual property of our instructors.
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about
Don Werthmann is a Professional Photography Faculty member in the Digital Media Arts Department at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor. While teaching a wide range of courses for over two decades, among his favorites are the project and portfolio development classes, because it’s when students organize large collections of work for the first time and realize that their images are not just objects; they are ideas. Don is the recipient of the 2024 TRENDS in Occupational Education, Outstanding Faculty Award.
Don’s passion and appreciation for various forms of visual art and art history emerged when he was a teenager, that eventually led him to earn BFA and MA degrees in Photography from Wayne State University, in Detroit. His forty-year career spans across commercial, editorial, photo education, film and digital eras, web design, studio and location lighting, and most recently handbound bookmaking.
Before launching a twenty-five-year college teaching career, Don arrived at Santa Fe Workshops as a participant in 1991. He returned in 1994 for five years as their Operations Manager and a workshop instructor. This is Don’s sixth year teaching at SFW, and he is thrilled to return for this online experience.
As a practitioner in the genre of lyric documentary, Don’s images are infused with curiosity, the lyricism of everyday life, and a naturally unfolding tapestry of events presented to the camera. He recently self-published a handbound book entitled, To Think Outloud: The Collection of Visual Poems for Visual Literacy. One iteration or another of the Quatrain Project is visible by following a link noted below.
Website: quatrainfotographic.com
Instagram: @don_werthmann
