Tuesday was an all-day bus ride from Guatemala City to La Ceiba, Honduras. Fourteen hours, with a bus change and layover of 2 hours in San Pedro, Honduras. Met our cab driver in La Ceiba and took the 45-minute ride up the dirt road to Las Mangas.

After disembarking in San Pedro my iphone was “disappeared” – slipped out of my pocket in the seat, and I was off the bus before I realized it. A “search” by the bus service personnel turned up nothing. Mysteriously I was not allowed back on to look for myself.

So much for keeping in touch by email – all of my contacts were on the phone, not yet in this new computer. Hopefully I’ll be able to restore everything from the backup when I return and get a replacement.

The next two days were spent teaching photo classes to the students at Guaruma, the school project here. Originally started as a photography school for the children in Las Mangas, the project now has expanded to include environmental awareness studies and English, and has a second location about 5 kilometers farther up the mountain in El Pital.

The project we created for the kids was a simulated magazine cover, to teach the students awareness of shooting pictures for a specific format and subject, and then laying out the cover with their photos in Photoshop.

Wednesday we met up with Guaruma’s assistant director, Chris Poliquin and the school’s English teacher, Erin Coutts. That day we worked with the students in Las Mangas, and the theme of their assignment was “form and color in nature”. We took a walk along the nature trails that Guaruma maintains up the road and across the river just outside town.

The kids here are very much into macro photography, and their sensitivity and awareness of their environment is great to see. A few leaves on the jungle floor become a carefully composed still life, often displaying the subtle interplay of muted greens and browns, other times exploding in the vibrant colors of jungle flowers.

And insects – Oui! They have a critical eye for the smallest creature resting on a leaf or poised on the end of a branch, and work their subjects like a fashion photographer working with their model. Incredible shots of what others might think of as mundane and perhaps something to be dismissed and avoided.

After shooting their photos, we returned to the school where they loaded them onto the computers and learned how to combine the images in Photoshop into a template Eric created as the cover layout.

Then they played with changing type colors and fonts, moving type around the page, and learned how working with layers simplifies so many things. The students were excited to discover what they could do in the program and quickly realized how these techniques could be used with other projects.

Thursday we went up the road to El Pital and worked with the students up there. Neither of these “towns” are even wide spots in the road, but El Pital is a bit more “rustic”. There’s no nature trail there and the focus of their shoot was portraiture of the townspeople.

After some pointers on the do’s – and don’ts – of taking people pictures along with an explanation of how to shoot for a specific format, we unleashed this gaggle of paparazzi on the town.

While a few held back and preferred the comfort of using each other as subjects, most were quick to engage people they met (of course in this town, everyone knows each other) and ask to take their picture. Most were willing subjects and enjoyed working with the kids.

After corralling everyone and herding them back to the classroom, the kids went through the same process of putting their photos into the “cover” template. This group was a bit less computer-savvy than the Las Mangas kids, but nonetheless picked up the concepts and techniques pretty quickly.

This project gives the students an opportunity to learn practice skills that they’ll be able to apply to all of their photography as they move forward in developing their skills.

All of the members of the Jakaramba studio will be participating in the workshop. Up to now their clients have been primarily local and regional non-profit organizations, and they’ve worked on smaller projects. We hope they’ll come away from the workshop with a clear direction for the studio and a solid marketing plan, ready to take their business to the next level.

The client for this workshop will be FotoKids itself, and the project a self-published book to be used for promotion and fund-raising. Plans for the he book are to include an overview of the Fotokids project, feature photographs by FotoKids students, and to touch on the beauty and challenges of Guatemala.

Additional customizable chapters will include bios on individual students, coverage of the Design4Kids project and a look at Jakaramba.

Instructors for this workshop will be Design4Kids director Jeff Speigner, teaching graphic design, Cathy Shea teaching marketing, and Eric Lollkema and myself teaching photography. I’ll also be working with Cathy to interject the small business, target marketing approach with her big business marketing skills and experience.

Eric and I will be arriving a week early and making a side trip to Honduras, where we’ll be teaching photo classes for several days at Guaruma, the Honduras branch of Fotokids.

An interesting side note I’ve recently learned is that while it is currently the rainy season in Guatemala, with moderate temperatures and daily storms, Honduras, right next door but on the Caribbean coast, is in their dry season, with hot sunny days and temps near 100! Quite a climate variance in a area the size of the Carolinas!

Check in regularly – I’ll be providing periodic updates during the trip – internet connections permitting.

In some ways PR photography can be one of the most challenging to make interesting, as the subject is often someone speaking at a podium in front of a group. Sometimes the speaker is the shot – a notable who’s presence is the newsworthy event. Other times having the speaker in context with a display showing the topic of his talk helps provide creative elements for a photo.

In one of the more interesting displays at this show, one of the auto makers had a cut-away car with the body shell split down the middle. The two halves spread open revealing the interior, frame, engine and all the insides of the car. The show attendees could get in the car, with a product specialist, and the body closed, all while the specialist described the many features of the vehicle.

It looked great, and would have been an easy capture in video, but getting still photos that described the process provided a bit of a challenge. Open, the body halves and interior looked like a static display, and closed it just looked like a car. A single shot of the vehicle closing still looked like a static display.

I used post processing in Photoshop to help solve this one. I set up the camera on a steady tripod, and did a series of shots. The first was the display open, with the people inside. I then shot several exposures of the car closing, until it was completely closed. Each individual shot looked like this:

I first tried using the PhotoMerge tool to see what happened, but as I suspected it would, it just ended up with the open and closed frames merged together.

 I then opened each photo in Photoshop, and one at a time dragged each successive shot onto the next. I created a Layer Mask and with a low opacity brush erased some of the area where the car was closing in the underlying frame. That was flattened and dragged onto the next closing frame, and the process repeated. The final image looks like this:

This is a process very similar to the one I use when combining exposures of architectural interiors, and with a little practice it’s actually quite simple. The students who take my classes discover that it’s simpler and quicker to do this than to describe it!

We had them shoot a bracket from -2 to +2 and then showed them how to import their images into Lightroom and make adjustments to their photos, recovering much of their under- and over-exposed frames.

It’s exciting to see the lights come on when the concepts sink in and they “get it”. Ana, one of the girls from “the city” (as Guatemala City is know down here) observed that the shot she liked best wasn’t the “correct” metered exposure – recognizing that having the skills to control the exposure allows you to interpret your image the way you visualize the final result.

Next we repeated the two classes with the more experienced members of the group. While most of them claimed to understand the use of aperture and shutter, it was clear that they all had only a little experience in applying the concepts of manual exposure control in their photos. Once they realized what they really can do by making the camera do what they want, they got totally into the process as well.

Tomorrow is an “excursion day” – no structured classes, but rather a creative play day, with activities that allow the kids to apply and practice the concepts and techniques they’re learning this week. Can’t wait to see what they come up with!

We go at about the same time each year (around July 4^th), stay at the same house we’ve stayed at each year, and after that much time it all has the look and feel of familiarity that we all find in our own every day surroundings.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

Now don’t get me wrong – it’s a beautiful location, it’s great to spend time together with the family, and there’s plenty to do at and around the lake. It’s hardly a boring vacation.

But after this long, I found myself working much harder to find new and different photo ops. Being a bit laid slowed down by an injury this year kept me from being as active and from ranging as far afield as I usually do, and that certainly played a part.

One of the first reactions in a place like this is to zone in on the beauty of the place and the ever-changing scene unfolding as weather moves up, down and across the lake.

But after ten years, I found myself thinking, “OK, so I don’t have a photo of the lake with THAT particular cloud formation, but I’ve got eleven dozen with cloud formations that look an awfully lot like that one.”

Of course, there will always be the shots of family and our activities, which are a never-ending source of subject matter. When we look back, it’s those pictures that keep the memories of those wonderful times alive.

We may always go up to the airport for the Fourth of July Pancake Breakfast, but this is probably the only time that I’ll see my niece’s son – would that be my grand-nephew? I’m still confused about all that stuff – probably the only time I’ll catch him surveying his handiwork on his pancake breakfast like this.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

In fact there was barely time to lift the camera and press the shutter before the moment was gone. No time to carefully compose, and avoid the bright orange shirt behind him. A bit of localized saturation and tone reduction helped reduce that a little – believe me, that shirt must be neon international orange!

When the exciting becomes the ordinary, it’s helpful to go back to the basics, and take a look at things through different eyes.

Are you used to framing grand, sweeping panoramas? Switch to a long lens and take a much closer look at things. Concentrate on design, on color, on form instead of on what the subject is.

Select a particular focal length lens – even if it’s a particular setting on a zoom lens – and shoot everything, near and far, with that lens.

Get closer to your subject, for more intimate shots of people than the comfortable distance you may be used to shooting at.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

In the end, it was on the last morning there, sitting by the water having coffee, that the patterns of light through the water, painting the rocks below, gave me some of my most successful photos.

There’s always something new to see no mater how familiar a subject is. It just takes looking at it from a different point of view.

Vulcan San Pedro Accross Lago de Atitlan (c) 2009 Stu Estler

High ISO’s and wide open apertures were the order of the day much of the time here in Santiago de Atitlan.

Our Workshop Leader Jeff Speigner (c) 2009 Stu Estler

Lots of clouds and light rain making way for the deluge of water as the skies opened up once or twice a day, tempered by a few breaks in the clouds here and there. After all, it is the rainy season.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

The ebb and flow of weather shrouded volcano San Pedro across the lake in an ever-changing veil of mist and clouds.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

Of course, the last two days were clear and bright in the morning, as if word of our imminent departure had spread, and the beauty of Guatemala was enticing us to return soon.

View of San Pedro From My Room (c) 2009 Stu Estler

As the morning passes, the warming air gives birth to rings of clouds halfway up the slope. By noon a tremendous cap of billowing cumulous clouds gives the mountain the appearance of a new eruption – even though it’s been dormant for 40,000 years.

The great white and grey mushroom cap foretells the afternoon’s weather – torrential thunderstorms.

The weather taught new photographers and reacquainted we veteran instructors with the beauty and peacefulness of the soft light that embraces every subject when photographing in the rain.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

Colors that become washed out in bright sunlight are vibrant and saturated. The brilliant flowers growing everywhere burst from the lush blanket of green that defines the landscape. Everything glistens in the wetness crafting reflections not to be found when photographing on a clear, dry day.

I was prepared for the wetness there – I knew it was the rainy season. I did my homework and so anticipated the beauty of the environment and culture.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

What has completely blown me away has been the incredible talent of these kids! I felt humbled being there teaching them photography.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

Although they vary in experience and skill levels, their creativity, energy and ability is amazing.

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

To see what we’ve been up to take a look at www.design4kids.org

(c) 2009 Stu Estler

The next workshop is already scheduled for early December. New volunteers with specialties in photography, design and the arts are eagerly welcome! Check the Design4Kids website and keep looking right here for more info.

I’m told December is sunny and dry!

Started by FotoKids founder Nancy McGirr, this is the second Design4Kids workshop and the third workshop with the young people in Santiago. They continue to learn and develop their photography and graphic design talents with the purpose of operating their own design studio in the Atitlan area.

As in the past, the group will receive a real assignment from an actual client, and they will determine the client’s needs, design the concept and create the project. The team of volunteers is made up of commercial artists, graphic designers and photographers who will guide them along in the process.

The kids will be polishing their skills in design, photography and Photoshop, and along the way, they’ll develop and expand their creative talents, and learn possibility thinking that will teach them new ways of looking at themselves, the world and their own potential.

There’s more about the project and the team at http://design4kids.org and a complete overview of the Fotokids organization at www.fotokids.org

(c) 2009 Whitney Klare

I’ve mentioned my friend Whitney, Rudy’s granddaughter, and her passion for photography. She’s sent me a few samples of her work, and with her permission, I’d like to share them with you. She’s already an accomplished photographer, with a great eye for composition and design. From her work, I’m beginning to see that she has a strong interest in abstracts, in using the many tools of digital photography to create a vision of an alternate reality.

This got me thinking about how even when our intent is to create an image that doesn’t exist in our physical world, all of the skills and creative processes of photography still apply.

Being “old school”, and learning all of this well before digital came on the scene, I’ve been well trained in “getting it right in the camera”. Even with film and print-making, there are plenty of options for manipulating the image. But starting out and working with a pre-visualized result in mind is a true mark of your skills.

It’s valuable and important to develop your ability to do it “the right way”, both in shooting and in image processing and making adjustments, not to satisfy some “rule”, but because it gives you so much more control over getting the results you want.

Even with an abstract, and much more so as your images come closer to a vision of “reality”, being able to pre-visualize the shot you want, and understanding and working with the elements of light, composition and design to get those results at each step, makes your work that much more powerful.

(c) 2009 Whitney Klare

A true testament to your skills is to be able to visualize an image that isn’t there in front of you, shoot it and adjust it so that the final result makes people believe that it is the reality that was there. That’s when they say “Wow, how did you get such an amazing shot – I’ve never seen it look like that!” (Whatever “it” is).

Those of us from the “old school”

realize that it was Ansel Adam’s not-so-secret print-making work, together with an exact system of exposing and processing his film that created the magnificent images that he pre-visualized.

So keep shooting, keep experimenting, and keep learning and developing your skills.