Breaking The Rules: Fifteen Tricks for Clever Pix!

Pablo Picasso was a 20th century Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer who co-founded Cubism, an innovative art movement that revolutionized how we perceive form, art and space.

Picasso started out as a traditionalist painter, creating beautiful realistic images of the human hand, the face, and landscapes, and structures. Then he started to break the rules, and he created a whole new art form of symbolic patterns and shapes. And he became famous. And rich.

At Washington Photo Safari, we spend a lot of time teaching you the rules of composition, camera usage and lens usage, white balance, ISO settings, aperture, and shutter settings, and we ask you to obey all those rules. But in THIS safari, honoring our 25th Anniversary, we are going to show you 15 ways to break all those rules to come up with unique and clever images.

For example, Would you like to turn your children into ghosts? Better yet, are there times when you would like to know how to make them disappear? (We’ve all been there….)

Without resorting to Photoshop, would you like to have your camera:

• Turn a gray night sky into sunset red?
• Create a blue sky on a rainy day?
• Move the moon across the sky so that it sits right where you want it to be?
• Place the image of a friend’s face onto a blank wall?
• Get rid of all the moving people and cars in a cityscape scene?
• Turn the moon into a red planet to look like Mars?
• Turn waterfalls into silky white streams?
• Straighten out those converging vertical lines of your tall building pictures?
• Turn the French countryside into an impressionistic painting from the window of your speeding 180mph TGV train?
• Capture vendors haggling with customers over price in a busy Asian marketplace without their knowledge?

Would you like to:

• Create a cityscape scene with long lines of red streaming taillights and white streaming headlights?
• Turn a waterfall or fountain stream into a million ice pellets?
• Turn a neon light display into whirling colorful abstract art?
• Create the “whoosh!” of traffic on a busy street, or the blur of people rushing through a train station or airport?
• Make a red rose pop out from a totally blurred background?
• Stop the wings of a hummingbird?
• Enhance the contrast between a deep blue sky and puffy white clouds for more dramatic landscape and nature scenes?

Ya can’t do most of this stuff with a phone, but you CAN do it WITH a camera IN the camera by learning just a few tricks on shutter speed, aperture, filter use, lens choice, white balance, and multiple exposure from professional architectural photographer, WPS Director, and Master Trickster E. David Luria in this 2- hour session conducted in the heart of Washington DC in the beautiful gardens of the Smithsonian Castle! And you even end up with a tips sheet you can take home that gives you the answers to all those specific questions!

For this unique photo safari you will need a DSLR or mirrorless camera, a medium length telephoto length lens, a 35mm or 50mm F1.4 or F 1.8 lens, a tripod, a dark neutral density filter and a circular polarizing filter, plus curiosity and a willingness to learn tricks that provide hours of photographic fun!