Snappy Shutters Fraser Island Retreat – Awesome!!

What a month!! Everyone knows me to be hectic, but the last few weeks have been a standout for amazing experiences, great times spent with current and new friends, and some seriously amazing photography (usually captured by others more talented than me!!). The gallery exhibition was exciting enough (and I recently posted the Behind the Scenes setups that I did), but this little post is about an amazing 4 days I had being one of the workshop presenters (and sponsors) of the Snappy Shutters Fraser Island retreat! Read on for more…

Where to begin? Perhaps check out the Snappy Shutters Fraser Island event listing if you want all the background, but here’s the quick summary:

• Arrive at Lakes Entrance Weds and take the ferry across to Fraser Island, get set up and settled in
• Thursday teach two workshops (studio vs ambient lighting outdoors, and action photography with laser triggers), and then intro light painting Thursday night with Neil Creek before the bonfire
• Friday teach two workshops (studio vs ambient again, and help out the PROtog guys with the speedlight portraits challenge with Z), as well as host another light paint event Friday night
• Saturday was wrap up and pack up

Before I get into the photography discussion and examples, serious High-5’s and thanks goes to the organisers and the other suppliers/supporters, as follows:

• Glenn from Alba Photography (and his wife Voan) for organising the event, and being generally awesome! So much energy, so many random trivia questions with multiple answers…
• Larry and Grace from CandyBox Photography – Larry is “Just awesome”(tm) as photographer, videographer, and chef extraordinaire!! Grace is amazing as a photographer, workshop instructor, model, hard-core raver (less tequila next time) and all round fun person to hang with!
• Jeff and Mike from PROtog, great guys willing to give their time and expertise and even set up lights without a single complaint (although the Octo request got the “are you serious” look!! Just jokes, kidding!!). Fun times…
• Minnie, Z and Grace as our models (and Z was also makeup for the whole event – seriously brilliant effort, book her if you need MUA!!)
• Everyone who attended – without the fun, energy and talent of the photographers who came along, it would have been a dull event! Well done everyone!

My own experience? I found the whole event pretty amazing – lots of great photographers and talented contributors, a really friendly crowd that got on really well together, and some really creative results that were of a standard well above what I was expecting. This group was a great example of the kind of talent and creativity that is going to blow us old-skool shooters away with their creations over the coming years.

I even managed to get a little photography in, which you’ll see at the end of this post. More interestingly (for me anyway), I finally got around to doing some timelapse sunsets, and a timelapse bonfire!. I’m well down the road to getting motorised dolly’s going so that I can do those very cool timelapse videos with the camera moving, but one thing at a time. The final videos are on the ShutterClass YouTube Channel if you are interested.

Enough rambling from me, here’s a few of the images from the event (with credits in the alt-text when you hover your mouse). If another event is held in future, I recommend you get along to it!