The Aegean Center Digital Photography Summer Workshop

The summer digital workshop was a transformative experience for the six of us who attended.  We all learned to see in new ways, to understand the technology of printing with the amazing inkjet process and to comprehend subtleties we didn’t know existed.

We worked for six  hours a day, six days a week  in the beautiful lab at the center.  Although we all felt overwhelmed by the information in the first days we soon sorted through it and began to feel more comfortable moving through the work spaces of Camera Raw and Photoshop.  The basics of computer handling aside, the programs we worked with were fairly intuitive and quickly gleaned by playing with the tools.  The hardest part was learning to see the color shifts, knowing when the image was too cyan or too magenta for instance.  We learned acronyms and abbreviations of all kinds from WYSIWYG and  SLR to  ICC profiles and HSL.  We began to speak the secret language of the digital world.

An exhibit of our work was held the last Friday and we were pleased to hear the compliments  and realize we had come so far.  It would be easy to forget the sequences and specifics of each printer and process but with time and practice I think we all feel ready to try on our own.