I am super excited to announce that I will be co-leading Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee's popular Vision and Technique Workshop next month, Oct. 6-9 2017. I've been helping with their workshops since 2003, and have been more and more involved in some of the teaching over the years. We've been talking about doing a version of their workshop for digital photographers for the past few years. We recently came up with a new format that brings together analog and digital photographers with an option to extend the workshop an extra day to learn in-depth digital black and white processing and printing with me. 

This new Vision and Technique Workshop format is ideal for people working traditionally and digitally to experience and learn the important aspects of the vision part of the workshop together as a group, and then show how those things can be applied technically in their chosen workflows. This will allow people interested in the developing sheet film by inspection and contact printing with Azo (now Lodima) and Amidol time for that. It also allows those interested in digital printing to learn the same ideas we teach in the darkroom expressed through digital techniques. The critique session will allow each group to come back together to gain greater insight on how different techniques can influence how they see their own work. 

Learn More and Sign UP

About Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee

Photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee are husband and wife. Smith has been a photographer since 1966 and has worked exclusively with 8x10-inch or larger cameras since 1967. Chamlee, who is a painter as well as a photographer, has been photographing since 1985, and has used an 8x10-inch camera, almost exclusively, since 1990. Their photographs have been collected in 140 art museums worldwide and they have each published seven books of their photographs.

In addition to making their art, Smith and Chamlee contribute to and enrich the world of fine-art photography in a number of other ways and are committed, perhaps more than any other photographers today, to keeping the traditional craft of photography alive. 

In order to save Kodak's silver chloride Azo contact printing paper, Smith and Chamlee became the exclusive dealers of Azo for a number of years. When Kodak discontinued all black and white papers, Smith and Chamlee attempted the nearly impossible task of having a new silver chloride contact printing paper made that would be as good or better than Azo. After five years of R&D, they succeeded. They named it LODIMA PHOTOGRAPHIC PAPER.

They established LODIMA PRESS to publish photography books of extraordinary quality. To date they have published over 50 books, with others currently in production.

While sensing a need to provide other photographers with the finest archival mat board, mounting, and storage materials, Smith and Chamlee acquired a defunct mat board business and formed LODIMA ARCHIVAL MATERIALS.

Their use of large format color film necessitated high-end drum scanning and printing for their color prints, so Smith and Chamlee founded LODIMA DIGITAL to provide drum scanning and digital printing services.

See Lodima.org for all things LODIMA