Workshop final

What You will Learn

In this workshop, I'll be teaching you the fundamentals of photography from my perspective and a little more. I’ll share with you my thoughts on equipment and gear, teach you how to master exposure and camera settings, and explore framing and composition, getting natural light to work for you instead of against you, editing on Lightroom, and how to work with color. There will be lessons on how to shoot portraits, street photography and daily life, and we'll find inspiration from looking at other photographers' work and work towards finding your identity as a photographer.

We'll work through assignments together, and you can expect assignment feedback and the chance to ask questions beyond the syllabus. We'll also be talking about the intangible things that can help us become better photographers, which includes learning how to fall in love with this world, and how to continue creating despite the constant onslaught of fear and self-doubt.

By the end of the workshop, you will gain a firm grasp of basic technical skills - which is important and forms a solid foundation for your future practice - and learn how to see the world like a photographer and how to begin using photography to express your personal truth.

JOIN A Community of Passionate Photographers

Joining the workshop also gives you access to our closed Discord server, where you can continue to gain support from the community as it grows. You can ask questions, share your work, join our future events, and connect with each other on an ongoing basis.

Workshop Details

Level: Beginner
Duration: 4 sessions once a week / 120 minutes per session
Location: Singapore (in our studio Apartmentofu and on location)
Group size: 4-5
Dates (tentative): Saturdays, 2-4pm / 20 Aug, 27 Aug, one-week break for assignment, 3 Sept, 10 Sept 2022
Fee: $527
Coffee, tea and snacks provided =)

Tell the truest story you know

I think Ernest Hemingway was the one who said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." The same can be said about photography, “All you have to do is take one true photograph. Take the truest photograph that you know."

So that can mean taking a photo of something so mundane in your life that you wouldn’t normally care to think about. This alone can break your inertia and your belief that you have no story to tell. But your story, no matter how boring, how ordinary, is not boring or ordinary to others if it is true, since no one on this earth apart from you has lived your life.

In this workshop, you will learn to tell the truest story you know, or at least, begin your photography journey from there.

About Me

Hi, my name is Rebecca. I was born in 1986 in Singapore, where I currently live and work. I have been a photographer for the last ten years of my life, working as an advertising and commercial photographer.

Influenced by music, literature and film, I have always worked to inject emotion, story-telling and a sense of the cinematic into the images I create for a diverse range of commercial, advertising and editorial clients across multiple industries and cities, including The New York Times, Singapore Tourism Board, Monocle, The Economist, Pictet Group, UOB, Qantas Airways and more.

In my personal photography, my instinct is to tell honest stories about where I am, who I am, what I am feeling. I want my photographs to connect to the deeper parts of me that usually don’t get to see the light of day.

I first fell in love with photography when I was 18 or 19, browsing Flickr. Of all the images on the website, I found myself drawn to the ones that were grainy, moody, mysterious, cinematic and sad. I’d stare at them and wonder how these images came about, and I wondered about the photographers too, who seemed to live such deep, memorable, colorful lives.

I yearned to be like these photographers. And I yearned, even more, to be somewhere else. In fact all of my late teenage years were about wanting to be transplanted to a better reality. I idolised writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, who all went to faraway places and lived big, adventurous lives. I wanted to go to England or America or India and join up with young people who were smarter and cooler than me, who could teach me how to smoke cigarettes and drink beer and who’d bring me along on their wild and crazy road trips into the unknown.

But while I used to think of my camera as a passport, a means of getting to places I don’t belong, today I think of my camera as a most ordinary but profound tool, which I use to document and appreciate life as I see it, life as I live it. Photography is and will always be a blessing.

Workshop Curriculum

Session 1

In our first session, we will start learning photography by taking our first portrait. We’ll go on full manual mode, so we can gain a deeper understanding of how the holy trinity of exposure - ISO, aperture and shutter speed - really works. We’ll talk about composition and framing rules and how to break all of them so you can do things your way. We’ll work with natural and ambient light and learn how to adapt them to our advantage. We’ll also find inspiration by looking at the work of some of the most amazing photographers in the world.

Assignment: Who is your favorite photographer? Collate a few of his/her images and create your own images that are inspired by his/her work.

Session 2

In session 2, we will explore the question, “What is good photography?” and spend time photographing food and every day objects. Along the way, we will practice how to expose our images successfully in different kinds of lighting situations. We’ll talk about light as both an element and subject of photography. We will also begin using Lightroom to view and edit our images. You will share your work from last week’s assignment.

Session 3

Color in photography

Session 4

24mm lens