| The Quiet Landscape: Beyond the Picture Postcard

Delve into the art of capturing landscapes with depth and emotion, moving beyond the cliché postcard image to create memorable and powerful images with your own distinct visual voice.

The world around us has changed, yet the creative approach to landscape photography has remained largely the same. The Quiet Landscape is a fresh approach to traditional landscape photography. Break the rules, look deeper, and ignore the easy postcard shots. In this workshop, you will be challenged to remove the clutter, the obvious, and the cliché from your frame to create memorable and powerful images with your own distinct visual voice.

The coast of Maine has long been an artist’s paradise. The diverse ever-changing landscapes of Maine’s coastal regions have been an inspiration to working artists for centuries. This workshop will inspire existing landscape photographers, as well as those new to the field, to create distinctive imagery that embraces the minimal while transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Alissa and Jacob Hessler, both residents of Mid Coast, Maine, take students off of the beaten path to some of their favorite shoot locations, including their 18th-century farm with an orchard and blueberry barrens.

Through slideshows, class critiques, and demonstrations, Jacob Hessler, a fine-art landscape photographer, helps students capture their own interpretation of the modern landscape, distilling it down to its unforgettable essence. This class is a balance of honing the artist’s eye and advancing technical skills. Through daily shoots and fieldwork, students are inspired to change their perspective and see photographic possibilities in seemingly familiar scenes. Shooting the unique early morning and late evening Maine light, attendees will leave empowered with useful new skills that will bring their photography to the next level.

In addition to the fieldwork, this class will explore the work of other contemporary photographers using the landscape as a subject. Alissa Hessler, an art director and photo editor, will help students define and refine their developing signature style. She will work with students to edit, sequence, and add the final polish to their completed images. She will also assist attendees interested in developing a strong portfolio, photography book project, or a concise body of work for exhibition.

At the end of the workshop, you will leave feeling confident to shoot, critique, edit, and sequence your photography in new ways.

Note: Students should bring their own laptop, external hard drive, and a thumb drive for transferring files.

All Images © Jacob & Alissa Hessler

Past student work

clockwise: Andy Edelstein, Austin Halpern, Nancy Crute, Lyn Harrison, Randall Gebhardt, Sharon Emmons, Dayne Greineder.