Ooookay, back from the second big trip this year (the first one was the Everest Trek in April/May) - and what can I say? It was fun, and it was extremely productive. Here are some of the highlights:

 

First I spent a day at Joe McNally's lighting workshop (watch the video here), and then the Brooklyn Cookin' Workshop with its truly different concept was not only a great learning experience for everyone, I also ended up gaining about two pounds of weight. Oh well. If you want to know what the workshop is like, it inspired participant and professional designer Alan Barnett to write three blog posts about it (read them here, here and here). » Brooklyn Cookin' workshop

 

San Francisco Street Safari 2010 - 17 photographers and one wonderful city. This is one of my favorite workshops, as we get to go out and spend time among the great people of San Francisco and take pictures of strangers. Watch the video to find out how much fun everyone had. » watch the video in HD

 

Photo Day 2010 at the TWiT Cottage... - Between the travel and the workshops I had the great chance to drive up to Petaluma once again and take the stage in front of Leo Laporte's cameras to talk with photographers. Photo Day 2010 was great, the guests were awesome and video of the event will be published soon. While you wait, why not watch the Photo Day 2009 videos?

 

... and the San Francisco Apple Store - I also had the chance to speak at the Apple Store on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. I used the opportunity to talk about some of my work, and as the entire week had the overarching theme of people photography, I chose to present my work from the last two Everest Treks.

 

And last but not least, on my more elcectic side, I've shot another one-minute-in-the-life-of video. About a big bridge. Watch it here. (Like it? Here are a few more: kite surfers, night ride, shallow dof, tea, more tea and toothbrushes)

 

Okay, I guess I'll crash for a few days now.

 

What was the highlight of your last two weeks?

Statistisch gesehen besitzt jeder Mensch heute mindestens eine Digitalkamera. Da liegt die Hürde für die Teilnahme an einem Fotoworkshop einigermaßen niedrig.

Auf der analogen Seite liegt die Sache schon ganz anders. Viele von euch, die sich die analoge Fotografie einmal etwas näher ansehen wollen, haben keine analoge Kamera. Oder ihr habt vielleicht eine Kamera geerbt und wisst nicht, ob die für den Workshop passt. Oder ihr findet euch nicht im riesigen (und erstaunlich günstigen) Gebraucht-Dschungel auf eBay zurecht.

Kurz: es gibt unzählige Gründe, warum jemand trotz Interesse nicht am Analogworkshop teilnimmt. Und das finden wir schade, denn die analoge Fotografie ist nach wie vor ein sehr mächtiger und guter Weg, mit der Fotografie im allgemeinen Tuchfühlung aufzunehmen, und die universellen Basics zu lernen, ohne sich in der digitalen Technik zu verheddern. Mal ganz abgesehen vom haptischen Erlebnis und dem befriedigenden "KALUNK" einer schönen Mittelformatkamera...

Dass die Hürde für viele von euch unnötig hoch liegt, spüren wir. Darum haben gibt es ab jetzt unseren Kamera-Pool, um es jedem auch ohne eigene Kamera zu ermöglichen, die Welt der Fotografie mit Film auf unseren Workshops zu erkunden.

Wir leihen euch für den Workshop eine Kamera. Selbstverständlich im Preis des Workshops inbegriffen.

Im Kamera-Pool finden sich unter anderem so Zuckerstücke wie: Minolta X-700 (Kleinbild), Mamiya 645 (Mittelformat 6x4,5), Zeiss-Ikon Tenax (24x24mm-Format), Yashicamat 124G (Mittelformat 6x6), Cosina Hi-Lite HDL (Kleinbild), Diana (Mittelformat/Kleinbild Sprockethole), Nikon FE2 (Kleinbild), Voigtländer Bessa (Mittelformat 6x9), Kodak Brownie 620 Box (Mittelformat 6x9) und Zeiss Ikon Tengor Box (Mittelformat 6x9).

Und auch im Polaroid-Bereich ist die Sammlung mittlerweile ganz anständig gewachsen. Da finden sich einige Polaroid SX-70, diverse Polaroid-Land-Kameras (600er-Film), ein Polaroid-Back für die Nikon FE2 (Trennfilm), um nur einige zu nennen.

Und wer dann nach dem Workshop selbst zuschlagen möchte, der bekommt von uns natürlich die richtigen Tipps für die eigene Kamera-Jagd bei eBay, bei Gebrauchthändlern oder auf Flohmärkten.

Dieses Jahr bieten wir noch zwei Analogworkshops an: Absolut Analog Polaroid-Edition (11.-12.9.2010) und Absolut Analog (Standard-Edition, 8.-10.10.2010)

Dann haut mal rein!

Wow, what a journey, what a trip. And we all returned safe and with lots of pictures, not only on our memory cards but most important in our mind. It's often impossible to portray the true scale of things, so taking a scene in instead of shooting a quick snap of it is sometimes the better choice.

I have now started posting some of my photography from the trek here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nubui

Okay, now "past" is a very relative term and given that the last Abbey Adventure workshop has taken place just about half a year ago, you might think that's no time at all - but given the fact that the new workshop season is in full swing already and that I have been spending most of that last half year to get everything ready and up to speed for 2010 (yes, that's twenty-ten), half a year feels like a very long time.

Which makes this video even more fun. It was entirely shot and edited by Ingo, one of the participants, and it just brought back a ton of great memories about a fun workshop group.

Oh, and sorry, there won't be an English language Abbey Adventure this year, and the German one is already sold out, but if you're interested in any of the other workshops, just follow this link.

2009 Abbey Adventure Workshop

It is one of those things that are very dificult to explain. And if you try to explain it, you will almost inevitably end up in the realm of NSFW.

I am — of course — talking about The Marquardt Scale.

If you followed any of the recent Everest Trek coverage over on The Rest of Everest or if you have listened to the Everest Trek 2010 announcement on Tips from the Top Floor, you will already know what that scale is about. If not, it's about time you found out.

I came up with the scale on the Trek in May. Even though it was a silly idea at first, it almost immediately stuck with everyone on the trek and it was used daily by virtually every trek member.

During our dinner in Lukla on the last day of the trek, the usage of the Marquardt Scale finally found its culmination in Jon Miller's immortal words: "I just had five one-point-eights within thirty minutes!"

Well, but what is The Marquardt Scale?

In describing what that scale is lies my biggest difficulty. I would love to be able to explain it in one or two short sentences in a way that is completely family safe.

Can you help?

Here are the rules:

# Leave a comment to this blog post with a short explanation about what the Marquardt Scale is.

# It should be no longer than 25 words.

# Make it funny, make it wacky, make it family safe.

# Only one entry per participant.

# Update: the scale officially starts at 1.0 and ends at 2.0 because it should be analog to "number one" or "number two", which is used by parents in some English speaking countries to avoid having to say the more obvious words in front of their children. Massive bonus points if you manage to work that into your explanation. If you already submitted an answer before this update, your personal number of acceptable entries is automatically extended to two. (e.g. feel free to go again)

# The jury (Jon Miller, Monika Andrae and myself) will choose the winner based on a top secret selection process.

# The jury reserves the right to not use any of the handed in entries for any reason.

# All entries have to be in by Nov/27. Later entries will not be accepted unless the jury really loves them.

# The prize is an awesome TFTTF Everest Trek t-shirt that was hand-embroidered in Kathmandu.

# Anyone apart from jury members can participate. This includes the 2009 Everest Trek participants.

Now DIG IN!

Video is wonderful. It lets you develop this quick feeling for something, usually much quicker than reading through paragraphs of copy or listening to lengthy audio. And social video is even cooler, as it lets the producer get his video out to so many more people, and collect inputs and get social linkage, and sometimes... very rarely, one might even go viral.

The flood of video sharing sites also has its drawbacks of course, as you might eventually end up with quite some fragmentation as to where your videos are. I sure experience that. Some videos are on Youtube, some are on Vimeo or Blip.tv, just to name a few. And pulling those together into a coherent user experience has been pretty difficult in the past.

Has been.

Because now there is yubby, a free online service that lets you quickly and easily create a channel with videos from all types of sources, that you can then embed in a web page as a widget.

I have just done that. Thanks to its great search capabilities and somewhat consistent tagging of my videos, it took me about five minutes to pull together a channel of the videos that I (and others) produced at various workshops, and place it on my main workshop page.

Yubby lets you then choose one of several ways to present your videos, from a grid down to a small player, which is the one I opted for. I should actually even be able to embed it here. Let's try.

See? It's that easy.

» The widget in action on the workshop page

» yubby.com

Workshops, workshops, workshops... 2009 was such an exciting year in so many respects and I am very grateful for being able to do the things I do.

With Brooklyn Cookin', the workshop that I held together with Chef Mark, this year's season is now over, and what a great final workshop that was. Both Mark and I found that we'll have to do a workshop along the same lines again next year. The concept is perfect: the target audience is couples where one half is into cooking and the other half is into photography, and here they have a way to learn and spend time together.

Even though this year is over from a workshop perspective, it actually isn't. At least not for me. I am going to spend most of November preparing everything for a smooth 2010 launch. My goal is to have everything ready by December. And there are a lot of things to be worked on. Luckily most of my workshop locations are already nailed down, some helpers need to be briefed, and then there's the whole registration process. I have looked into offers in the cloud, but there is no workshop/seminar management system that even remotely seems to fit the bill.

All I need is to manage the registration process and payments for about ten workshops. Internationally. With deposits. And limited number of seats. For a decent price. And no, in an economy where everyone needs to think twice before spending anything, I consider taking 10% of the workshop fees *not* decent, because that would eventually increase the workshop price by that same amount.

So in short, I haven't found a good and easy way to automate this yet. Which is why I've taken things to the cloud in a different way for 2009 and why I'm going to go even further in 2010. In short: I'm using online services and forms to handle the sign-ups, I have simplified the confirmation and registration process using Services on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, I use PayPal to handle the bulk of the payments, and I use my own time to keep it all together. Not ideal, but workable. The KISS principle applies. Keep it simple, stupid. I don't need a full-fledged database to handle a couple of hundred participants. Every participant ends up in a spreadsheet with a status field depending on where in the registration process they currently are, and if I need to send out a bulk mail to all participants of an individual workshop, a simple copy/paste of the email address column for that workshop will do just fine.

The biggest item are the workshop pages on the web site. This is where everything is supposed to come together in a nice and easy to navigate way. I have spent hours and hours to design something that ties together everything from basic information about the workshop ("why would I want to come to this workshop?"), the agenda ("what are the workshop details?"), timing ("when does the workshop start and end?"), accommodation ("what hotel is near by?"), navigation ("how do I find my way to the workshop?") and pricing.

Obviously I design this once and duplicate it for all the workshops, but the content will be different for each workshop. The overview, the detail description, the example images, the example video, the FAQ. And the language.

So I guess I better get busy and finally start tying all those lose ends together to bring you not only an excellent 2010 workshop season, but also a great experience when it comes to finding the right one for your needs and going through the registration process.

If you want to be notified as soon as the 2010 workshops are ready, please make sure you are on the newsletter (get the newsletter here).

Got a way to help me simplify the registration process? Leave a comment!

I can't say no. At least not often enough. The result is that too many things all of a sudden tend to happen at the same time for me. But then in times like these with the economy looking grimmer than it should, I guess doing lots is not the worst strategy to follow.

The biggest thing that's occupying me right now is the workshop planning and organization for 2010. Before I started doing the workshops, I couldn't imagine to plan a year and more in advance. This is normality now. And it also at times gives me that childish joy of "I know something you don't know". Until it's time to reveal it all. So let's lift the veil a bit.

Workshops reloaded

Some of the best of the past workshops will see a re-issue in 2010. San Francisco Street Safari for example was really awesome thanks to Gary's great ideas and help, and I want to do something along those lines again. And Gary is up for it too. Then the Everest Trek. It was a life-changing adventure for me as well as everyone else who participated, and we've just opened the registrations for next year's tour to the Himalayas. The German-language abbey workshop around the Happy Shooting podcast was great fun too and therefore will most likely also happen again. And thanks to the support from Thomas, Berlin is very likely to happen again too. Then there's the beginner's workshops that I held in Tübingen during summer. This was very special, as it really helped me to not forget the importance of the basics and that there is an important foundation that is so easy to forget when teaching more advanced seminars. So all of those are very likely to resurface in one form or the other.

New things on the horizon

And then there are new workshops on the horizon. I love putting new things on the map. It's fun, it's creative, but of course it also is a lot of work. New locations need to be found, new workshop concepts need to be evaluated and tested, and in general a lot of communication has to happen to make sure these new workshops will be a great experience for all the participants.

So what are the new workshops coming up in 2010?

First, I am looking into doing a bit more around post processing. The digital darkroom and the digital photographer's workflow are an integral part of photography these days. Most of the past workshops included some post processing, but it's impossible to do more than scratch the surface unless you dedicated several days to this topic. But it's clear that this is important. The question "when will you do a workshop just about post processing?" is among the most asked ones.

Then I always wanted to do a workshop in the area of Urban Exploration. The biggest issue here is the fact that a lot of locations that lead themselves to this type of photography aren't readily accessible to the public. So I'm still looking into this.

On the German-language side Happy Shooting will bring us one or two workshops in the Dresden area, the details of those aren't fully spec'd out, but we'll get there.

And as if that wasn't enough, I'm currently working on a series of highly targeted workshops for professionals of a totally different field. But that's kinda under wraps for now.

So things are moving, and my goal is to have the majority of the workshops ready for booking by December 1st. That's only two more months...

Have you been on a previous workshop? Interested in any of the future seminars? Got a suggestion or anything else to say about the workshops? Leave a comment!

Interested in any of the progress?

» Keep an eye on the workshop list
» Videos of the previous workshops

Just returned from a four-day workshop that I held at the Inzigkofen Abbey together with Boris. This abbey is one of my most favorite places. I've spent a lot of time there over the last 15 years, having been a participant on their annual jazz workshop for over 12 times. So it was a really special treat for me to finally hold a workshop there myself.

The team at the abbey has been great, the meals were awesome as usual and we had a wonderful workshop group with really fun participants (click the image above).

Pictures taken at the workshop should start popping up on Flickr over the next few days tagged kgw09. See all pictures on flickr tagged kgw09.

Next month I will hold another workshop at the abbey, and that one will be in English and with participants from the United States, the UK and from Switzerland. Want to add another nationality to the list? There are still openings at the Abbey Adventure!