Street Psych: San Francisco

The course price is $650. 

Limited to ten participants.

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Bordered by the Bay and the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco is one of the great cities in the United States. Contrary to its nickname of "Fog City," the second most densely populated city in the States has perpetually excellent weather and light, and ultra-friendly residents, making San Francisco great for street photography. 

Street Psych | San Francisco 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! We also believe that photography is not just about making images: it's a way of approaching life.

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 concentrate on three parts of the downtown area: the Embarcadero, the Financial District, and Chinatown. Combining lectures and camera work on the street, we will focus on fundamental principles of art and psychology as we help 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 participant's story of San Francisco.

A special thanks to Deann Best for being a patron of the arts and supporting the ground work required to make this course happen!