In April, Asia Eidson worked with a group of student photographers interested in mastering golden light.

Friday afternoon, she walked them through working with subjects for couples’ portraits and then that evening took them on a shoot with models to experience the challenge of getting informal pictures as the light disappears at the end of the day.

Saturday after she took a second group through a typical early-morning shoot, Asia introduced students to strategies for editing portraits in Adobe Lightroom. As Adobe Creative Cloud continues to be available to the campus for free, we see a growing number of students tapping the power of tools like Lightroom.

If you’d like to hear about future student workshops, email us at learningstudio@acu.edu to get on our mailing list.

Web Portfolio
http://www.photobyjoy.com

Image Credits:  Alex Gabriele, Brittney Johnson

This fall we brought back Asia Eidson to lead a hands-on workshop introducing ACU students to photography for social media branding.

In the all-day workshop, she introduced the visual decisions professional photographers make when taking pictures that affect the way viewers feel/think/experience a product. Technical choices of specific lighting, props, and depth of field can affect the way others feel about a brand.

Asia worked with local businesses to provide students real-world projects to tackle: “I think the strongest part of the workshop was that the images these student photographers designed, shot, and edited went straight into the hands of small businesses to use.”

If you’d like to hear about future student workshops, email us at learningstudio@acu.edu to get on our mailing list.

Web Portfolio
http://www.photobyjoy.com

Image Credits: Karina Hernandez, Meagan McBride

This fall we took faculty to Albany for our first Outdoor Drawing workshop as part of the 20/20 Teaching Innovation program. Dan McGregor, Art & Design, introduced the basics of contour drawing, one and two-point perspective through a series of drawing challenges faculty completed in pencil and ink. Participants were challenged to look closely and draw what they see rather than the stereotypes that are in our head. As Dan said, “Drawing is an act of love, seeing the subject as they are not as you want them to be.”

ACU 20/20: Envisioning the Future of Education is a 5-year program of Teaching Innovation Grants that “builds on the skills and insight of our excellent faculty, strategically exploring new models of teaching . . . in order to impact student learning across campus.”

The Learning Studio will continue to partner with the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning to support individual grant recipients and to offer additional faculty development workshops that spark new approaches to familiar classroom challenges. Thank you, Dan McGregor, for your patience, energy and expertise.

If you missed out this semester, email us at learningstudio@acu.edu to get on the waitlist for future workshops.

We kicked off the semester with our first faculty workshop for the 20/20 Teaching Innovation program. Mike Wiggins, Art & Design, and Kyle Dickson, director of the Learning Studio, introduced a range of approaches to creativity to faculty from across campus. Participants worked together in a series of hands-on projects to consider creative processes from entertainment and design with potential applications to research, teaching and learning.

ACU 20/20: Envisioning the Future of Education is a 5-year program of Teaching Innovation Grants “builds on the skills and insight of our excellent faculty, strategically exploring new models of teaching and drawing from existing bodies of research in order to impact student learning across campus.”

The Learning Studio will partner with the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning to support individual grant recipients and to offer a series of faculty development workshops for the campus. Thanks to Mike Wiggins for helping us kick things off this fall.

If you missed out this semester, email us at learningstudio@acu.edu to get on the waitlist for future workshops.

This weekend the Learning Studio brought in Asia Eidson to lead two workshops in portrait photography. Asia is an ACU grad and LS alum now running a wedding photography business in Dallas. This was our first advanced photography workshop focused on portraiture, and we had talented groups of faculty and students who worked with student models to gain experience shooting their own natural-light outdoor portraits.

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One powerful part of both workshops was getting to hear a professional walk through her workflow for bringing hundreds of photos into Adobe Lightroom to organize, edit, and export high quality images for print and web. Many who picked up Adobe’s advanced image editing software for the first time were producing striking images by the end of the workshop.

If you’re looking for a way to jump-start your own image-making this spring and can’t wait for our next workshop, check out Lightroom CC Essentials on Lynda.com.

Special thanks to the ACU student models and to Rachel and Chris Riley for a great couple days of location shooting.

Web Portfolio
http://www.photobyjoy.com