Elliot Stern - Owner & Instructor
Thanks to his dad, Elliot has been involved with things photographic since he was about 5 years old and working in his dads darkroom. His passion for the art and what can be created through photographic capture has grown stronger year after year.
That is why he enjoys teaching and helping others expand their knowledge,
so they can record their world in new, different and creative ways. Your
images today can influence your world of tomorrow and tell your story in a way
that nothing else can. And this is why he has created BLUE RIDGE
WORKSHOPS.
His dad now 92 years old , taught him a great deal about photography and it has been a most wonderful experience for Elliot to teach his dad digital photography. Even at 93 he is still shooting pictures and printing them.
Elliot's career, which spans over fifty years if I include his dads darkroom, has taken him into many different areas of the photographic world.
He
has been a portrait photographer, wedding photographer, photo journalist,
nature and scenic photographer, architectural photographer, military
photographer, and a recorder of memories and history in those capacities.
He has lectured, performed classes, and educated countless numbers of people
about photography and digital workflow across the country and now wants to
bring his experiences and knowledge to Blue Ridge Workshops.
Over the years, while expanding his photographic knowledge and teaching
experiences he had the good fortune to be associated with several manufacturing
companies. One of those companies, which greatly influenced his career
was NIKON INC.
He worked for Nikon for 33 years, selling and teaching and it gave him
the incredible opportunity to be in the forefront of the digital revolution and
certainly gave him the opportunity to learn all of the new technologies and
deal with all of the challenges that those technologies brought with
them. Having dealt with all those challenges has helped him teach the
concepts of digital imaging and digital work flow to a great many aspiring photographers.
After retiring from Nikon, Elliot worked in the Photo Retail end of the
business, always hoping to create a company like Blue Ridge Workshops which
would allow him to do the things he loved most, which was shoot images and
teach. While in retail he did very advanced classes on Nikon single lens
reflex cameras, and digital workflow.
Now he is in a position to form the Blue Ridge Workshops, and bring on some
highly capable instructors with many years of experience like himself.
The workshops for Elliot are very important. They will give him an opportunity to pass on his knowledge and experiences to others in a comfortable, easy to learning environment. By becoming the educator and bringing in other educators, each with their own particular slants on photography, he can finally achieve his dream, creating some of the best photography workshops available.
Elliot's current choice of equipment is Nikon Digital Single lens reflex cameras and lenses and flashes. But as Elliot has quite often stated, "there is not a bad digital single lens reflex in the market place. They are all capable of producing incredible images, but never on their own."
That is why he feels so strongly about teaching photographers how to master their equipment and at the same time develop the right skills in photographic technique to produce incredible images.