About OPEN STUDIO WORKSHOPS

WHAT MAKES OUR RESIDENTIAL WORKSHOPS UNIQUE?

Nothing matches the creative buzz and collective experience of a small group OSW residential workshop.

Set up by Eddie Ephraums and Adrian Hollister, our unique range of outcome-based workshops cover the practical, creative and aesthetic considerations of being a photographer. You will be inspired, motivated, encouraged and pleasantly challenged.

The Open Studio workshop centre (pictured) overlooks Loch Ewe, in NW Scotland, looking towards the Torridon mountains and the Outer Hebrides. With its own sea-view cafe, lecture room and fully equipped imaging studio, it makes the perfect photo location workshop centre.

Our aim is to support your creative photographic development, working with you individually and as part of a mutually supportive workshop group. Our workshop leaders fulfil the key roles of experienced educators, facilitators and mentors. Because of this, we always have a minimum of two leaders, sometimes three, and we often draw on highly experienced local experts.

All of our workshops are outcome based, so you might make a boxed set of prints to help perfect your printing, work on a photo-illustrated foldout notebook to develop your ideas around a theme-based workshop, or complete a handmade book to express your unique view of the workshop subject in question.

Although we are based in the magnificent NW of Scotland, our workshops are focused on much more than the visual appeal of this iconic landscape. Each workshop is designed to look deeper into a subject, rather than just visually looking at it. For example, this might be when we work with one or more of a wide range of extremely knowledgeable local experts to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the geological, geographical and human forces that shape the world around us. And, in these times of climate change, we will also be exploring environmental issues in future workshops. We also work with other artists, such as poets and painters who incorporate photography into their creative practice.

Our Open Studio workshops are inclusive and open – ‘open’ in many senses: we want to help you develop your own way of seeing and to be free to work at the studio or outdoors. Our workshops are open to all types of photographer and are certainly not limited to the landscape photographers one expects to visit this spectacular part of the world. We attract documentary photographers, photographers working with poetry and other forms of the written word, and artist-photographers working with mixed-media. Our workshops are not hierachical, with leaders who are in some way ‘better’ or more ‘knowing’ than participants. Instead, we encourage everyone (leaders included) to be open to new ideas and fresh ways of seeing. And our workshops are not technique-driven – not even our printing ones, although there is always plenty of technical knowledge and support on hand. Instead, we focus on developing each participant’s personal creative practice to help reveal what that looks like.

To widen everyone’s horizons still further, we have have run a number of our workshops from other studio based venues, such as Inverewe House. In future we are expanding this idea. Our Isle of Harris 2019 workshop will be based at the wonderful sea-view Talla Na Mara Centre. As with all our workshops we have computers, printers and finishing equipment on hand, and always with the freedom to get out and photograph, either as part of the group or individually.

We look forward to seeing you on a workshop sometime soon.