Firstlight Workshop brings together some of the world’s most talented photographers in the most beautiful locations in the world to share their knowledge and experience in digital photography. Learn to create extraordinary images and master digital photography under the tutelage of these photography professionals in an environment that will awe and inspire. To learn more about creating perfect digital images, please visit Perfect Digital Photography.

2009 Workshop Schedule

Smith Island on the Eastern Shore of Maryland

October 11-16 & October 17 – 22 ::We have all the details for both of these workshops, to be held back-to-back in an absolutely magical and special place.  A very remote, and very real, fishing community on the eastern shore of Maryland, this is a rare opportunity to step into a part of American lore that is rapidly disappearing.

A marsh-clad island is a place alive. It ripples sleekly beneath the wind’s stroking, altering mood and texture with every caress and pummel. Its salty sameness stretches a perfect artist’s linen beneath the sky, a playground for the romp of light, and exquisitely responsive to every shift of sun and season and weather. A thousand channels and cricks and guts rive the marsh, and through them the bay perfuses Smith Island like some great, amorphous jellyfish…..
“Island Out of Time” Tom Horton

A “first” for FirstLight, this workshop will be focused on the multimedia aspect of photography.   Photographers will “team-up” in pairs, working on not only capturing powerful, storytelling imagery of this community, with unparalleled access to the “watermen” of the area, they will also use small, high-quality sound recorders to capture the sounds of the area as well as interviews with the people of Smith Island.  Author Tom Horton, of  “Island Out of Time” , a wonderful and insightful book about Smith Island, will be one our 4 instructors, providing insight and hands-on examples of the art of the interview.  Sound and images will be melded together using “Soundslides” software, into a final package, each student producing a multimedia  show, shared with our students and the community the final night of the workshop.

The Chesapeake Bay never essayed truer, nor flowered more gloriously, than in its creation of Smith Island and Smith Islanders. Far more than any Mariners Museum, or Mystic Seaport or Williamsburg, working watermens’ communities like the island are art–made all the more artful for contriving nothing, for simply being and enduring. Everywhere, people are beginning to realize that the planet itself is an island, that all of us, eventually, must act as if its resources and capacity to absorb pollution are finite, and learn how to live within our means. Sustainability is the buzzword, even becoming the watchword, of environmentalists and governments. We are all in a sense islanders. We just draw as yet from a bigger pool than the Bay, and mask our overdrafts for a time with technology, or by flushing pollution off to somewhere else.
“Island Out of Time” Tom Horton

This is the first “Where’s Jay” column, in which Jay Dickman will post a group of images or a single image, from his recent travels, along with the story behind the images.
This year has been busy, intense and hectic, and I would not want it any other way.  I’ll post the first trip of the year, Antarctica, with this group of images.

Sometimes the “photo-gods” have to be with you, as was the case in this series.  It was several days into the first of two National Geographic/Lindblad Expeditions Antarctica trips, having started in Ushaia, Argentina.  We boarded the Explorer, the newest ship in the Lindblad fleet, a beautiful, state-of-the-art 1A ice-class expedition ship.  We had made a landing at Paulet Island, exploring the area where Dr. Otto Nordenskjold and members of the Swedish Antarctic Expedition of 1901 had been forced to winter in a hurriedly built stone hut.

One naturalist had offered to motor me around in a Zodiac to photograph penguins and the incredible ice formations found in the icebergs and smaller ice, click here for an interesting definition of ice-types found in the Antarctic Sound.

I was photographing a beautifully-sculptured “Bergy Bit”, a small iceberg under 16′ tall, when quite suddenly-and unexpectedly-an adelie penguin exploded straight out of the 28 degree water, up on the side of the ice…tried vainly to gain purchase on the ice, almost getting a toe-hold, but slid back into the waters…all captured in this series. Olympus E3, 50-200 lens @ 108mm, 100 ISO, 1/500th @ f7.1