Nature Photography at the Omega Institute

“A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.” – Herbie Hancock

I’m teaching a week long photo workshop at the Omega Institute this week, and I started the class with this quote from legendary musician Herbie Hancock. It encompasses my approach to teaching and getting students to trust their own instincts about their creative potential. While it’s the harder path intitially, I think it gets people thinking more deeply, and asking the hard questions about why they photograph. And hopefully I can help them answer that question in a way that brings clarity and makes photography as rewarding as possible. 

Here are a few more favorite quotes I like to share with students.

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” – Anton Chekhov

“Searching is everything – going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.” – Wynn Bullock