Kim Komenich

Make Great Pics and Vids – a Weekend Workshop for Writers Who Want to Add Skills

October 23-25, 2015

This weekend will help anyone dramatically improve their skills, from mid-career print reporters looking to transition to freelancing to bloggers looking to enhance their content. Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer Kim Komenich, a veteran photojournalist for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle and an award-winning teacher, will lead a weekend workshop offering both practical tips and theoretical and creative grounding to become a better story-teller with pictures and videos.

More and more newspaper jobs now require reporters to be able to use cameras to augment their texts with still and moving pictures. For bloggers, it’s a given that they need to take their own pictures and videos – and need to make them great, not just serviceable, whenever possible. There is no simple trick to taking the leap from serviceable to great, but as with reporting and writing, it helps to take your time and look for the larger context, not just try to snap a shot on the fly.

“Most photography we see is the result of a collision: You see whatever is in front of you, shoot and then keep moving,” Kim says. “I like to think that when you practice it at a higher level, photography is an equation. You’re dealing with color and light and moment and gesture as simultaneously evolving variables in an equation that brings you to a higher level of perception.

Komenich, a journalism and new media professor at San Jose State, is a veteran photojournalist who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in spot news photography for his pictures of the Philippine revolution for the San Francisco Examiner. In his recent project, “Revolution Revisited,” Komenich reconnected with twenty-five of his 1980s subjects in the Philippines to explore how their lives have turned out.

Komenich is also an accomplished documentary filmmaker whose most recent work, “Cowboys: The Story of the 1943 Wyoming World Championship Team,” premiered in Laramie, Wyoming, in March 2014.

The weekend workshop will begin on Friday afternoon with an hourlong hike followed by dinner and a multi-media presentation from Kim. Over the course of the weekend, in addition to group sessions, each participant will receive at least an hour of one-on-one consultation time with Komenich.
<<< Sign up now via the links below – to reserve a spot, make a deposit via the paypal link below or send us a check. Any questions? Call us at 831-471-8459.