Champagne! Imagerie is born ;-)

Imagerie is born. It's a new venture that is focused on providing high quality and high creativity photographic workshops and I am honoured and happy to be part of it.

Imagerie has emerged from the interactions and conversations amongst Frans Roex (owner of the Axis professional photo lab and communications bureau), Pol Leemans (a professional photographer, www.fotostudioleemans.be), Johan Doumont (a professional photographer and trainer, www.johandoumont.be) and myself.

We see the need for an additional, novel offering in the area of photograpic workshops from two sides. First there is of course the inevitable transition from analogue to digital photography. In addition to the existing pool of amateur and pro photographers, tens of millions of people have discovered (or are discovering) the excitement of working creatively with images. As a result, many of them will want to sharpen their technical skills. That is the first audience Imagerie wants to cater for: amateur photographers who want to come to grips with the new digital medium and professionals who would like to streamline and optimise their workflow.

But Imagerie does not want to focus exclusively on building technical skills. As our life world gets increasingly flooded by a never ending stream of images, people will search for new sense, for new meaning in dealing with this visual deluge. Photographers will want to make more personal statements, thereby trying to mine deeper layers of their creative potential. That is why Imagerie will also offer courses to help people develop and refine their photographic vision and language. In these seminars, we’d like to explore the photographic landscape from many angles: analogue and digital, colour and black-and-white, sharpness and flou, toycameras and large format.

For our first season, we have lined up an fairly impressive series of seminars. For absolute beginners in digital photography there is a 1-day introduction course. For slightly more advanced photographers we have developed a 3-day course “Photoshop for Photographers” that gives an overview of all the key phases in a digital workflow. Finally, for serious amateurs and professionals there is a series of 1-day InFocus seminars, zooming in on advanced topics in digital workflow, including RAW, batch processing, inkjet printing and scanning. Johan Doumont has developed all these courses, drawing on his long experiences in teaching photographic subjects.

There are four non-technically oriented courses: panorama photography, working with unsharpness, “small” photography and an introduction to large format. For the latter we are happy to co-operate with Dutch large format specialist Hans Bol. The other three courses will be developed by myself (in collaboration with Johan).

In my photographic development, I have benefited from the generous input of inspiring teachers. I am looking forward to this opportunity to share some of my knowledge too.

For more information (in Dutch): www.imagerie.eu.com