Richard Young has designed and developed this week-long winter retreat to offer you the chance to immerse yourself in developing your style and composition skills. The goal of the retreat is to help you develop and refine your approach to self-expression and style, hone your compositional skills and produce some stunning fine art prints that showcase your unique style and vision.
Richard and Glen Howey will lead a series of talks and tuition that will challenge your approach to nature and the landscape and teach you skills that enable you to grow and evolve as a photographer.
At sunset and sunrise each day, you’ll create new work as you explore your approach to landscape photography. From mastering the wide vista to producing intimate landscape images, you’ll have the opportunity to revisit the same locations and build a collection of work that can ultimately be crafted into a portfolio showcasing your unique style and vision.
All meals at the lodge are included, along with a single room (no single upgrade required) and transport from Christchurch Airport is included. Once you have been picked up, we will take care of everything else!
On the retreat, you’ll experience some immersive and inspiring learning opportunities via a series of keynote talks on developing style and refining composition. You’ll also learn about specialised shooting techniques to control perspective and master the creative use of depth of field to expand your modes of self-expression. We’ll work through a series of exercises designed to challenge your shooting style, and Richard and Glen will run a dedicated session focused on helping you to critique and print your work.
Set in one of the most stunning winter locations featuring grand mountain vistas, alpine lakes, beautiful rivers and elegantly placed trees within the landscape. This retreat offers the ideal locations within which you can refine your individual style and explore different ways of working within the landscape as a photographer.
Richard Young is a Fine Art Printing Ambassador for Epson New Zealand and has 19 years of experience producing and selling fine art prints over his career as a professional photographer. He has also managed two art galleries and worked alongside established artists to digitise, print and showcase their work. He brings to this experience a refined portfolio-building process, experience selling photographic prints, and a love for exploring a more expressive approach to landscape and nature photography.
Glen Howey has been a travel, documentary and landscape photographer for more than 30 years. He graduated from Wellington Polytechnic with an Advanced Certificate in Photography (Honours) and also holds a Bachelor of Applied Arts (Visual Art and Design), majoring in Photography, from Whitireia New Zealand. He has worked on numerous book projects and has great experience in refining a body of work, he is also an expert in advanced lightroom processing and image workflow.
Spencer Clubb’s landscape and wildlife images have received recognition in several major photography competitions including New Zealand Geographic, Australian Geographic, Outdoor Photographer and Scottish Landscape Photographer of the Year.
Learning the technical side of photography is relatively easy and can be done so with a textbook approach. Style and composition, however cannot be mastered by a set of rules; first you need to unlock who you are as a photographer and what you wish to express, this will then justify the shooting style and your compositional choices. To achieve this, the technical side of photography needs to be second nature.
For this reason, this retreat is designed for those who have already mastered technical skills such as using manual mode, filters and achieving the correct depth of field. We are unable to teach this on this retreat. If you are looking to gain these technical skills, please look at one of our masterclass workshops.
Having an Epson SC-P906 printer setup on-site gives you the opportunity to make prints of your work each day to help evaluate your work to refine your approach to the landscape.
No previous printing experience is required.
A moderate level of fitness is required for this workshop to make sure you can access all the locations. Most locations we shoot will require some walking of 30 minus one way, sometimes uphill or on rough trails carrying your gear – possibly in snowy or icy conditions.
To offer a creative environment, limited to a group of 6 photographers to have the time and support to develop your photography skills and to fully explore each beautiful location and push creative limits.
The workshop is based at Ashburton Lakes in the Canterbury High Country. We will pick the whole group up from Christchurch on the first morning of the workshop. On the last day, we will drop you back at Christchurch City/Airport to connect with late afternoon flights.
Start time on day 1: The whole group will be picked up from Christchurch at around 8 am, and we will drive to our location. If flying into Christchurch, you will need to fly in the day before the workshop.
Finish time on day 4: The workshop finishes at midday in Ashburton Lakes and returns to Christchurch to connect with late afternoon flights after 4 pm.
A non-refundable deposit of NZD$800.00 is required to reserve your space for the workshop. The remaining balance is due 30 days prior to the start of the workshop. You may pay in full at the time of booking, the balance (minus the deposit) will remain fully refundable until 30 days before the workshop.
Booking and Cancellation Policy: Please click here for our booking and cancellation policy.
Both guides had a lot of knowledge to share, their support is outstanding. Little tips and tricks can make all the difference to the final image. Loved every minute, thanks so much to both of you.
What a great time we had on the Winter Retreat. The winter really put it on for us.