A guest post by Sarah Ann Loreth, co-founder of The Wild Ones, a Flickr sponsored workshop tour around the USA and Canada. Follow the Wild Ones on Flickr and stay tuned for more updates.
We are The Wild Ones, a group of passionate photographers, artists, and friends who have left our day jobs to pursue photography as a full-time career to travel the US and Canada teaching photography workshops from July through October. Each of us has their own unique style and imagination to contribute to the artistic community and has accomplished great things thus far despite our youth that we’d like to share.
In 2013 we covered eight tour stops and more than 13,000 miles sharing countless hours and priceless amounts of inspiration with aspiring and established artists. Now we are excited to announce we are doing it again! This time with the added help of instructor, Rob Woodcox!
For those of you who have not had a chance to follow our workshop tour last year on the Flickr Blog, this is who we are:
Sarah Ann Loreth, a fine art photographer from New Hampshire who specializes in self-portraiture and conceptual portraiture.
Joel Robison, a conceptural photographer from a valley in British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains.
Shane Black, a professional landscape, timelapse, and astrophotographer, born and raised in Ohio.
Rob Woodcox, a surreal portrait and fine artist from Texas currently residing in Michigan.
The Dream
It’s everyone’s dream isn’t it? Quit your job. Sell all your possessions. Grab your closest friends. Give up the stress of every day life. And just travel. But what they don’t tell you is, anyone can do it! All it takes is a little bit of courage, hard work, and the desire to make your dream a reality. So, where exactly do you start? It all begins with a plan and preparation!
The Plan
Our plan is an annual summer traveling workshop tour to aide in the growth of photographic artists in connection with a not-for-profit organization set up. We do this by giving education in both photographic techniques and business consulting while providing a supportive and ongoing global community. We aim to bring hope and inspiration to those in need by empowering our workshop’s attendees to use the tools we provide to create stories and use art as a way of conquering life goals while laying the foundation to live their dreams and in that afford us the ability to live our own!
The Preparation
We polled our varying social media platforms to see where people wanted to learn and based our route off of that and started planning each of our incredible locations. This year we will be making stops in Boston, Toronto, Columbus, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Vancouver, Hawaii, Portland, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Washington D.C., and NYC and are looking to teach YOU.
We operate on the belief that every person has the opportunity to change the world and to reach their full potential in whatever it is they aspire to do. Our vision is to come alongside other artists of all ages and backgrounds to help encourage and nurture the realization of their own imagination and confidence.
The tour will be comprised of two day workshops, the first day focused on conceptualization and creation of images, and the second day concentrated on cultivating a business, identity, and finalizing exceptional images. The experience will remain light-hearted and reflect the youthful spirit you may have experienced in summer camp back in the day full of adventure, positivity, and growing as a photographer.
Our home is where you park it. We all gave up our homes and minimized our possessions to what we can fit in our van. With four or five people throughout the four months on tour we needed something comfortable, affordable, with a lot of room! We decided a gently used Dodge Conversion Van will suit our purpose!
We filled our van with prizes and swag for the students from our wonderful sponsors: Flickr, Vanguard USA, MILK Books, HGST, Kingston Technology, and Wacom …
… and decided to take on a side project of making care packages for the homeless to be passed out to those in need along the way.
And lastly, we found somewhere nice and beautiful to relax before the adventure begins!
On the road
We just started our journey in Boston this weekend. If you see a Dodge Conversion Van on the road with Flickr magnets and New Hampshire plates stop and say hi! And you can always join in on the fun by visiting our website for more information and to sign up for one of our workshops in a city close to you.
You can also follow our hashtag #thewildones2014 on all social media and through our The Wold Ones Workshop stream on Flickr.
We hope to see you on tour!