4 days masterclass with Simon Norfolk

July 11-12-13-14 2019, Fortezza del Girifalco

This program is a unique four day, practice-oriented photography workshop under the guidance of Simon Norfolk. Successful candidates will have the opportunity to participate in an intensive program of shooting, learning advanced techniques, group critiques, daily reviews and monitoring.

“I’d like to go out looking for some light. This is what I do when I’m working, so I think it might be useful for photographers to come with me and see it in practice. As a landscape photographer, light is not the story, but it is the most important part of the story-telling. Finding light is what I spend most of my time on when I’m in the field. For photographers, learning to think about light divides three ways: you need to see the need for it, know how to find it, and know how to capture it.”

This master-class involves working four days alongside Simon, beginning with classroom sessions in the daytime, a photography shoot in the early evening light and then back out again for a bright and fresh 4am start for the dawn light.

What we’re going to do:

Some people run classes by telling you to go out and take pix, giving them a quick critique and then getting you to go out again and take some more. Easy. I don’t do this.

I’d like you to start thinking about my class before I arrive. I approach these classes as if they were an assignment from a magazine and I pre-plan and pre-shoot them like a magazine shoot. I’ll be showing you just exactly what I mean when I say how to pre-plan them and how to pre-shoot. We’ll be going out taking pictures on a couple of nights, depending on the weather. We’ll decide these when I get there. So we will be working long hours and we will be working a ‘broken’ kind of day i.e. we may be starting in the classroom during the day, finishing early, meeting again around the time when it goes dark and taking pictures into the night. We might finish at midnight. Then we meet again at (maybe) 4am and take pictures until 6am (maybe). My preference is to then have breakfast and then go to bed again for a couple of hours. It isn’t possible to start at 4 and then stay awake all day. Don’t try. We will start again in the classroom late on those days to compensate for the early start, maybe at noon??.

I’ll be showing you a little of my work, a lot of paintings and (what is much more interesting) explaining why I make work that looks the way that it does. The classroom time will be more like formal lectures. For those of you booking travel home, we’ll finish about 5pm on the last day.