This is a special F295 members registration price! Sign up today and receive this great rate! This price includes over 20 hours of programming, including the events Thursday and Friday. This does not include workshops. Please register for those separately (though registration for the symposium is required in order to register for a workshop).This price is only for subscribing members of F295. To join visit www.f295.org.

Valid student ID is required to get this price. Please email a scan of the ID within 7 days to: info@f295.org. This price includes over 20 hours of programming, including the events Thursday and Friday. This does not include workshops. Please register for those separately (though registratio for the symposium is required in order to register for a workshop).

Register for the F295 Symposium today! This price includes over 20 hours of programming, including the events Thursday and Friday. This does not include workshops. Please register for those separately (though registration for the symposium is required in order to register for a workshop).

Choose this option if you're only interested in attending the Thursday night opening reception. This also grants you the ability to register for the weekend workshops, but you are unable to attend the Friday lectures and discussion.

Lead by: Tom Persinger and….. TBA.

Come join us for the third installment of the f295 symposium photography walk-about! It’s a great chance to spend a very relaxed time roaming, chatting, sipping coffee, and oh yeah - photographing some of the wonderful areas of Pittsburgh. The first year we explored the South Side, the next the Oakland area of Pittsburgh and this year we’ll be roaming in…… TBA!

This event is FREE but registration is required!

Instructor: Alan Greene

If the price of lenses has prohibited you from working in large-format photography then this exciting 2-day hands-on workshop is for you! Alan Greene, the author of the highly acclaimed technical manual Primitive Photography, will teach you the essentials of photographic optics the best and easiest way: by building your own view-camera lenses and making pictures with them!

We’ll begin with a brief discussion and demonstration of self-made optics. Then we’ll explore how one can either eliminate or use optical aberrations and distortions to create desired effects including: soft-focus, fish-eye, depth-of-field control (including ‘bokeh’), and rectilinear correction. Each participant will then make the following lens systems: single-element “landscape,” symmetrical-duplet, and telephoto. These lenses will be created using inexpensive and readily available materials such as optical surplus lens elements, paper, plastic tubing, and foam-core.

Instructor: Michelle Bates

f295 is pleased to host a special workshop with toy camera guru Michelle Bates. Low-tech medium format cameras like the Holga and Diana are popular for the mysterious, dreamy images produced through their simple plastic lenses. In this workshop you’ll learn how giving up some technical control can result in wonderfully unique and unexpected images. Students will learn how to shoot most successfully with plastic cameras, including how to use good old fashioned tape to manipulate light leaks, and how to modify cameras creatively. A slide show, demos, and hands-on shooting time will give students a comprehensive look at the “Plastic Fantastic” in action.

Instructor: Jill Enfield

Join us for this exciting day long exploration of modern tintypes and how to convert old ‘Brownie’ cameras to use for the tintype process! We’ll spend the first part of the day converting cameras, learning about tintypes (modern and traditional) and making plates in the darkroom. These plates, unlike the wet collodion tintype process, can be taken on location and used in the field far from a darkroom. Modern tintypes are very similar to the historic dry plate process; a short lived process introduced by Kodak in the late 1800s as a convenient alternative to wet plate photography.

Instructor: Christina Z. Anderson

This workshop will focus on the expressive quality of the gum bichromate process. Students will begin contact printing their negatives in multiple layers of pigmented gum emulsion. Watercolor and printmaking paper will be used as a support to print saturated images from a broad palette of color. Various light-resists may be used such as: large format negatives (4×5 and larger), pinhole, enlarged negatives, inkjet transparencies, cliché-verre, drawings on acetate and virtually anything that will block out varying amounts of light. Day two will explore more in-depth techniques such as tri-color gum, print manipulation, and guidelines for mixing chemistry and colors as well as paper sizing. This is an ideal workshop for those who have experimented on their own or taken a beginner level workshop and would like exposure to more advanced topics and information.

Instructor: Jerry Spagnoli

This exciting three day workshop will introduce you to the daguerreotype -the first photographic process presented to the public in 1839. A daguerreotype is a photographic image, produced on a sheet of polished silver, unique for its clarity and presence when held in your hand. The process has a rich historical legacy but has been largely lost to artists for over one hundred years leaving much much unexplored potential for the modern practitioner to explore.

This workshop will investigate the process introduced by M.E. Bequerrel 1840. The ‘Bequerrel Process’ requires none of the extremely hazardous chemicals traditionally associated with the method. The plates can be exposed in a large format camera or contact printed from film positives....

Instructors: Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman

Before “Black and White,” the earliest photographic processes were experimental, colorful and painterly. In this class, participants will gain an understanding of what motivated the movement towards photography and the rewards of early printing processes introduced by Wedgewood, Florence, and Talbot.

To begin, participants will learn how to create a shadow silhouette from life. This type of portrait is made with the action of light and the hand of the artist, or literally, “drawing with light” — the very essence of early photographic inspiration. The portrait is then scaled to miniature using a pantograph and either inked or hollow cut. The class will also capture shadows using the 1830s style Physionotrace apparatus....