Course / Class Descriptions:

Photography In-Depth, 2 Instructors, 2 studios 6 week course

One-on-one learning at your own pace in multiple studio and location environments.

The unique aspect of this course is that it is not curriculum based. We move at a pace and introduce concepts based on your personal experience level and rate of progress. Novice students can start out learning exposure techniques and camera functions and progress from there. Students with some experience can start with advanced shooting techniques and can progress into topics such as lighting techniques or advanced post-processing procedures. The direction of learning is tailored to your personal goals.

Instructor Bios:

Robert Rostick, the owner of theROSTICKgroup Commercial Photography and Digital Photography Training, is an award-winning photographer who has been in the business for over twenty years. Robert received his education at the Art Institute of Atlanta in photography and graphic design. He has been a well-received workshop facilitator and popular lecturer for a variety of organizations. Robert currently teaches continuing education photography courses at Hillsborough Community College and serves as the Education Director of the Tampa Bay Camera Club.

Jim Sykes is an award-winning freelance photographer, operates a small studio in the Ybor Art Colony, and leads guided photography tours in the American Southwest several times a year. Jim is experienced in product, event, commercial/corporate, landscape/fine art, travel, model, wedding, and portrait photography. His commercial work has been published in numerous books, magazines, catalogs and other media. His fine art hangs in many homes, offices, board rooms, and public institutions. One of his prints was recently presented as a gift from the City of Tampa to the President of Liberia. Jim is a member of Professional Photographers of America, Ybor Art Association, Tampa Bay Camera Club, and numerous other photography organizations in the Tampa Bay Area.

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Photography 101 4 week course

This is a curriculum based course intended to teach photography principles from the ground up, providing you with a solid foundation for working with your camera, lenses, and accessories as well as understanding the concepts of exposure, composition, depth of field, white balance, color theory, digital file types, photographic styles and genres, and post-processing techniques.

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People and Portrait Photography 4 week course

All studio and lighting equipment is provided for your use in this hands-on course that will cover different ground each week. Week 1 covers lighting equipment and styles, backgrounds, props, etc. On week 2 bring someone you know to the studio to shoot. On week 3 we do environmental portraiture - shooting someone you know in a work or home environment. Finally on week 4 you are provided with a professional model to shoot in the studio so that you can experience working with someone who really knows how to pose in front of a camera and take direction, The charge for this course includes the model's fee.

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Vision, Style, and Technique

A beginner class that is of a basically non-technical nature. I cover things to consider in general that are really helpful to anyone who enjoys photography, whether as a hobby or with the intent of making a business out of it. This is about how to approach photography of different genres, styles of photography, various techniques and tips that I've found beneficial to my own workflow, plus assorted stories and nuggets of wisdom culled from my own experience as a hobbyist-turned-professional photographer.

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Take Control Of Your Camera

If you use your camera in any of the automatic or programmed modes your camera is taking some, if not all, of the creative decisions about the shot away from you. Not only that but it is often fooled by scenes you may be shooting and can give varying and unpredictable results. Learn how the camera sees, functions, and makes decisions so that you can anticipate and avoid unwanted results in your shots. Learn to make the camera do what you want and get the results that you visualize instead of just hoping that your camera sees things your way.

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Landscape and Outdoor Photography

An in-the-field shooting lesson that covers concepts such as appropriate equipment and accessories, compositional theory and guidelines, tips, tricks, and techniques.

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Night and Low Light Photography

This class starts with an hour of time of class time covering equipment, accessories, principles, techniques, tips, tricks, and exposure guidelines. This is followed by 2 hours of shooting at multiple locations to put your knowledge into practice with your camera.

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Macro Photography

Learn to take a much closer look at the world around you. We will discuss theory, equipment, and accessories and then put it into practice. You will learn traditional techniques as well some unusual and innovative techniques to enhance your close-up creativity.

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Black and White Photography

Learn how utilize the wide range of tools available to digital photographers to take the world of color and convert it to the timeless beauty of black and white. Learn the different forms of black and white as well as find out what makes for a good black and image.  Learn how to avoid making dull monochrome images and make them have stronger visual impact. This class requires that you have post-processing software such as but not necessarily limited to Lightroom or Photoshop,

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Product and Food Photography

This class teaches a basic understanding of how to setup, light, and shoot products and food for publication. Special lighting techniques specific to this genre of photography are taught in this session.

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Introduction to Flash and Strobist Equipment

This class discusses the similarities and differences as well as the pros and cons of the most commonly used forms of portable and studio lighting equipment. If you are comfortable with camera operation and are ready to step up your photography by adding creative lighting to your repertoire of skills then this class a great way for you to get a feel for what gear will work best with your personal style and within your budget.

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Primer for Strobist-Style Shooting

This is a hands-on course for anyone who owns the necessary gear to trigger an off-camera flash unit(s). Simply being able to separate your light source from your camera doesn't magically make your photographs better. Learn techniques for understanding how to place your light with respect to the subject and the camera. Learn how to combine your flash with variations of daylight or ambient light to achieve various effects and elevate your images to a new level of sophistication.

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Introduction to Studio Lighting

This class teaches studio lighting setups and strategies for utilizing both strobe and continuous lighting equipment. Learn to implement lighting setups from basic to advanced, how to measure and set ratios without a flash meter. In this class you will see and make use of incandescent light, hot lights, fluorescent lights, monobloc strobe lights, and more.

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Photographing People With 1 Light

This class is ideal for the strobist-style shooter. Did you know that one light, plus one reflector, plus 3 basic head positions for your subject equals 30 shot variations? Whether you want to shoot with an off-camera speedlight, a single studio strobe, or a continuous light, you can apply these easy and classic techniques. You'll never have to guess or waste your subjects time again trying to get the light right. It's actually very simple and learning what a single light is capable of doing creates a solid foundation for the understanding of more complex multi-light setups as well.

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Foundation for Using Lightroom

If you want to get organized and speed up your photography workflow then you will want learn about the powerful of this software. Lightroom is much more than just a RAW converter and basic editor, it is designed to your streamline your post-production work and effectively organize your work. This class provides a new-user overview and teaches you how to use the software the right way from the start.

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Advanced Lightroom Techniques, Tips, and Tricks

Are you using Lightroom but hesitant to use some features because you haven't actually seen how they work firsthand? Are you only using Lightroom as a RAW converter and/or image editor because you are simply unfamiliar with the many other useful features of the program? If so this class is for you. Here is a partial list of what I will show you:

How to use multiple catalogs for efficient photo management
Cross-cataloging of image files
Tips and tricks for batch operations such as renaming, re-time stamping, re-sorting, etc.
Tips and tricks for speeding up first-stage work flow
Large-batch exports, conversions, etc.
Managing folder hierarchies and dealing with "lost" image files
How to use collections and how to put smart collections to work for you
Double processing and advanced editing integration with Photoshop
How to configure the FTP settings in the web module
Use the web module to create multiple galleries within a web site
Helpful tips for all 5 of the program modules
Lots of useful tidbits and even a couple of hacks to make you more productive

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Foundation for Using Photoshop

The Foundations class is designed to give those who have been using other
software (such as Elements) or no software, a head start on Photoshop. It
actually covers a lot of features and techniques that a new user would be
unfamiliar with. The idea of the class is to show how to set up the program the
right way from the start, how to develop a quick workflow, and to take the
mystery out of the overwhelming amount of options that a new Photoshop user
is presented with. Because the class shows some useful features and
techniques that are not available to Elements users, it may also serve as a
good way for current Elements users to evaluate whether it would be to their
benefit to incorporate Photoshop into their repertoire.

The class is more focused on setting up the software and learning to do routine
manipulations as opposed to being a "How to edit pictures" class. It provides an
understanding of the core techniques that are used the most during editing. As
the name of the class suggests it gives new users a roadmap to using what
can often be an overwhelming or daunting piece of software and lays a
foundation for what I teach in the advanced class. There are some gems in this
class that even a seasoned user may find useful.

This class will begin with an explanation of the Photoshop user interface and
workspace. We will discuss how to setup preferences and how to customize
and save specific workspace layouts with the most commonly used palettes
and tabs in order to make your working environment the most efficient. We
will discuss procedures for handling common file operations and cover some very useful tips and tricks for speeding up your workflow and managing common tasks.

There will be a discussion of various file types to guide you in making decisions when saving images. we'll discuss reasons and options for saving layered and flattened files, compressed and uncompressed files, capturing and manipulating screen shots, creating PDF documents, optimizing images for screen and web display, specifying file size and image quality, embedding copyright and other data.

We will then move on to learning a set of image manipulation techniques that can be applied to almost any image that you might open from a camera or scanner. We will follow that with explanations of some of the most useful tools and techniques for making use of them.

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Photoshop Core Techniques for Editing

We will begin with an in-depth look at layers and masks, two elements that in combination allow for the implementation of some of the most powerful image editing techniques. Blending modes will be explained and we will cover which of the blending modes are the most useful as well as how and why to implement them in your workflow.

Next we will cover adjustment layers. Each of the available types of adjustment layers will be explained and then we will cover methods for implementing the most commonly used adjustment layers. I will teach some very unique tips and tricks for utilizing adjustment layers, a few of which I have developed myself that you probably won't see taught elsewhere.

We will move on to cover utilization of specific filters on images. I will show you some specific techniques that I have developed as part of my normal workflow to quickly achieve certain effects and styles. I will cover the steps for recording actions in order to speed your workflow with repetitive tasks and will provide you with some custom actions that I've created to take the hassle out of remembering all the steps of some complex image manipulations that you will learn.

Expanding on the power of actions, we will then see how to use them to run automated batch operations on multiple files or folders to really speed up workflow.

Next we will learn to combine pixel layers, adjustment layers, masks, filters, adjustments, and specific tools in a repeatable workflow pattern for editing images. I will work through several images from start to finish, demonstrating tips and techniques throughout the process.

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Unique Photoshop Techniques, Tips, and Tricks

This class is for intermediate to advanced Photoshop users. I will demonstrate a collection of my personal favorite editing techniques. Many of these techniques have been developed by me based on my own photographic style and aren't taught elsewhere. This class is full of nifty time-saving tricks, unique actions, and hidden features. I can't say how many times
I've had a seasoned Photoshop user observe me using some of these features or techniques and say to me "I didn't know you could do that." or "I wish
I had known about that a long time ago."

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Advanced Portrait and Image Retouching Techniques

This class is not just for faces, it covers a variety of strategies and techniques for dealing with problems in various types of images. I have been correcting, retouching, and restoring images digitally for 15 years and have developed many methods for effectively dealing with the common issues that photographers are faced with when creating high-quality enlargements and pleasing portraits for clients. This is the class where I pass my own personal favorite techniques and tips along to you.

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