Editing with Intention
with Don Werthmann
July 12 – August 2, 2025
Course Description
Learning practical 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 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 over fifteen-years, including Lightroom workflows, self-imposed editing rules and rationales, and ideas for adapting a collection of images for different presentations, without forfeiting intentions.
Photographers are introduced to concepts, workflows, and goals, in preparation for putting editing tasks into practice with their own images and objectives guiding them. Each workshop session offers time to share our image collections in Miro to dynamically edit and discuss possibilities, obtain important aesthetic feedback, and garner support to move forward. Assignments between sessions can generate further insights about how to organize your work and inspire moving a collection or project to the next level of development. We also look back to examine classic and historically significant image sequences that support forming an appreciation of editing with intention at its finest.
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. For a closure element, photographers learn to draft a brief artist statement that can offer clues and convey ideas about their image collection for their target audience.
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 Classic 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 made.
Special Notes:
Sessions meet from 9:30 to 11:30 am (Mountain Time) on Saturdays starting July 12 and ending August 2. Enrollment is limited to 12 participants.
Zoom Video Conferencing software (available for no charge at zoom.com) is used to facilitate all class sessions. Further details will be emailed to registrants.
Miro Collaboration Workspace (available for no charge at miro.com) is a cloud- based application utilized to facilitate image editing in all 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.
Categories
about
Don Werthmann is a Professional Photography Faculty member in the Digital Media Arts Department at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, and over the past twenty-five years, he has taught a wide range of courses. Among his favorites are the project and portfolio development experiences where students organize large collections of work for the first time and realize that their images are not just objects; they are ideas.
In 2024, Don was the recipient of a statewide Outstanding Faculty Award by the Michigan Occupational Dean’s Advisory Council, which recognizes exceptional teaching practices, professional achievements, and service to his college. A passion and appreciation for various forms of visual art and art history emerged when he was a teenager, which eventually led him to earn BFA and MA degrees in Photography from Wayne State University in Detroit. His career spans over forty years across commercial, editorial, photo education, film and digital eras, web design, studio and location lighting, and most recently, handbound bookmaking. Before launching a college teaching career, Don arrived at Santa Fe Workshops as a participant in 1991. He returned in 1994 as their Operations Manager and a workshop instructor until the close of the decade. 2025 is Don’s sixth year of teaching at SFW, and he is thrilled to offer this online experience.
Don’s images are infused with curiosity, the lyricism of everyday life, and a naturally unfolding tapestry of events presented to the camera—a genre known as lyric documentary. He self-published a handbound book of original photography 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
