Street Psych: Old San Juan

The course price is $650. Pay by PayPal Invoice. 

Limited to six participants, with a minimum of three.

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Founded in 1521 by Spanish settlers, and a territory of the United States since 1898, Puerto Rico is an historic jewel in the Caribbean. 

The port city of San Juan provides an ideal background to explore street photography. Continuously in operation as an active port for nearly 500 years, San Juan’s Spanish architecture rivals European cities with its blue cobblestone streets, brightly colored masonry homes, public squares, and massive walls and fortifications. 

As a U.S. Territory, Puerto Rico uses the dollar as its currency, requires no passport for entry by U.S. citizens, and English is as common as Spanish. 

Street Psych | San Juan is an intensive, two and a half day course. Your instructors are professional photographer James Conley, and psychologist Ramesh Bakhtiari. We developed the Street Psych series because we believe it's not enough to make great pictures—it's better to understand why they're great, so we can consistently make more!

The Street Psych series of courses are based upon well-established theories of learning, drawing upon the works of Jean Piaget, M. S. Knowels, and Carl Rogers, among others, which emphasize practical experience combined with conceptual reinforcement. We have designed the courses to provide the fastest and most enduring outcomes, that are meaningful to you based on your goals and experience. Specifically, the course is designed to break down and expose the underlying processes of creative thought, as well as exploring how audiences view works or art. We take those understandings further, and explore the ways in which you can heighten your creativity though awareness of states of mind, social psychology and proxemics, the visual-perceptual process of gestalt and aesthetics, recognition of humanist archetypes, and embedded cognition (e.g., an approach to working which allows your mind rapidly to observe patterns and respond to your surreal ideas). 

Although it seems like a lot to cover, you will quickly discover that many of these skills and abilities have simply been latent. We will help you bring them to the surface so that you can take control of them and maximize their potential.

We will use an 8x8 square block grid of Old San Juan as our palette, combining lectures and camera work on the street. Concentrating on fundamental principles of art and psychology, we will guide you as you raise your visual storytelling to a new level. We will provide you with tools and insight which will not only immediately improve your photography, but will give you new paths to pursue as an artist. 

Among other things, we will cover: habits of an artist, methods of storytelling, surrealism, proxemics, and translating the technical aspects of camera and lens into visual emotion. The course work will culminate in a group book telling each participants’ story of San Juan.

Check out some more pictures: here.