Lessons
Minimalism - A Few Words to Start
00:43 2The Power of Negative Space
06:01 3Learn to See Visual Clutter
03:03 4Isolating Your Anchor
03:02 5Composing for Better Minimalist Photographs
03:57 6Choosing Gear to Create Minimalist Photographs
03:22 7Black and White the Classic Approach
03:38 8Working With Color
02:47Location Session - Apex Beach
04:54 10Apex Beach - Wrap Up
02:20 11Timing and Weather
00:44 12Common Traps and How to Avoid Them
07:08 13Post-Processing - When I Use it and Why?
14:19 14Print Your Work and Harness the Power of Minimalism
02:05 15Sled Dog Portrait Image Review
04:18 16Sled Dog Portrait Key Takeaway
02:43 17Location Session - Arctic Drone Flight
01:38 18Arctic Drone Flight Image Review
05:59 19Arctic Drone Flight Key Takeaways
02:10 20Snowkiting In the Canadian Arctic - Location Session
01:35 21Snowkiting Image Review
05:58 22Snowkiting Key Takeaway
02:27 23Class Summary
03:03Lesson Info
Arctic Drone Flight Image Review
So this first shot was taking taking pretty early on. I've got Torsten and his team over here and I've got this fun little ice feature up to the top left and I think that this has some of the elements of what I was going for. It has a bunch of negative space. It has good direction. I feel like it has good energy and it feels balanced with the visual weight here and the visual weight here and then just letting the rest of the frame be filled with negative space. The color for me is, it's not oversaturated, it's not too intense. So it's not that much of a distraction but it is a little bit off. I was using a filter, an nd filter on my, on the lens, on the drone. And so I think there was a bit of a color cast like a magenta, almost teal in some places and the way that the light at that time of day being so low and it was bouncing in and out of that, the filter off the lens. I think we got some weird color play, which ultimately was one of the reasons why I went with black and white. Here'...
s another shot from a little later son was a little lower. You can see that the Shadows are a little softer. It's not taken from the top down. I also wanted to make sure while I was out there that I got a few shots that weren't exactly completely 90° down and a little more birds, I I guess. And that was one of these. I just wanted to highlight Torsten and his team a little more against, you know, the vast empty arctic and I really, I actually enjoy this one in color because it feels a little bit warm. I think that without the color, if it was black and white it would feel more isolating more desolate colder. And that's not really how the evening felt. It felt warm and friendly and inviting. So I actually like this one in color. The fact that it's not completely top down and there's some context you can see like mountains and things like that on the, in the horizon. Really helped with that as well And almost giving like the image a sense of destination compare that to the black and whites. Here's one of the first black and white. So this is a complete top down and this actually this and the next one. We're almost exactly what I had in mind when I was going out. So I'm really, really happy with these. I wanted 90° straight down. I wanted to be black and white stark, just this classic minimal photograph of the dogs and Torsten and I've taken lots of photos of dog teams and dogs and I haven't had a chance to take much with the drone. So I was really, really excited. We had to wait quite a while to get the right night, the, you know, the right light low wind and all that stuff and the team and everybody's availability to go out and pull this off and to be honest, when I drew this on a piece of paper and explained it to my friends what it was I was looking for. This is pretty close, it's pretty bang on. I've got a really nice long shadows. I think that tourist bananas team being the central piece are super obvious. It's center frame, you know that that's what I want you to look at. I love that they're so small. I love all this negative space. I love that the lines are kind of offset from the direction of travel and all this pattern and shape and form is just beautiful. Um It really looks like a northern shot. It looks like exactly what I had in mind. Just like the second shot in black and white. Again, it's very similar except I've placed him in a different position. It's not centered, it's further or higher, higher up. So I'm further away so he's much smaller in the frame. It's um it's very graphic. Uh And I think that the placement here with this much space it works incredibly well and I'm gonna be super happy to print this guy up and put him on the wall. I will likely end up printing the first black and white as well. But this is the one that I really am excited to to put up and I love that he's placed in the lower bottom right and you've got all of this like sort of lead into the direction of travel. One of the final things that I wanted to mention was how I wanted the dogs direction of travel and where they were going to be very obvious. And it's not always super easy to figure all that out, especially if you've got a drone up in the air and you're dealing with dogs and you're working with somebody on the sled and you're, you know, kilometer away, flying a drone. So it was really important to have our plan, sort of our game plan worked out ahead of time. Torsten and I talked about the route that we were going to take a lot of the paths and the trails up there are they? They're put in early in the season, snowmobiles, dog teams, skiers. Um And so everyone kind of uses the same trail systems. And so it's very obvious once you're out there, the top down, you can't really tell it sort of blends in. But when you're out there, you know where the trails are. And so we picked the trail that we wanted. Uh I knew that would have sort of the clean ice I was looking for. It was important to get a certain distance away from the local airport. So we didn't want any other snowmobiles, any other dog teams, nothing that was going to interfere. So we worked all that out in advance and made sure that when we got out there, uh Torsten just had to basically stay on the trail. We stopped maybe three or four times. Just had a little back and forth. I told him what worked. Maybe it didn't work if he had to go faster or slower. And then it was basically just up to me to get in position, get ahead of him and usually have the drone up as he passed and then follow with the drone passed him by, turn around, wait for him to come back into frame and just do a couple of passes until the batteries died and repeat that as many times as we could before the sun went down.
Ratings and Reviews
Brittany Riggs
Lovely and information. The information was relevant and ended up helping a good bit.
Vincent Zuck
Very interesting class, in a very unusual location (Arctic), which blended together to give a top notch class. I learned a lot about Minimalism as applied to photography, and Minimalism as applied to post-processing. Curtis is engaging while teaching and demonstrating on site, or back in his "office". I really enjoyed this class. Thank you Curtis.
Kate Geary
Student Work
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