ABOUT YOur Photography RETREAT

General

At Adventures to Croatia, all of our photography retreats, adventure retreats and wellness retreats, WELCOME EVERYONE FROM AROUND THE WORLD. We are primarily english speaking, but do speak the native language of Croatian as well. Beginner or Professional Photographers and everyone in between are welcome on our photo tours. Our photo tours and private workshops are to simply help you define your vision and hone your skills. We are always with you to offer you both creative and technical advice - at your request of course. Mostly though, we want you enjoy your trip, make stunning pictures, expand upon your vision and abilities and have a great time doing so. And meet a bunch of new friends along the way.

Our photo tours are different in the sense that we create “experiences”, not classrooms. We introduce you to a diverse range of locations and various lighting scenarios that allow you the widest opportunity to make exceptional images and learn or better hone your practical foundations of the photographic creation process. We want you to challenge yourself to be better and to elevate your creative skills further than they were before you arrived.

Our photo tours are designed to meet the needs of individuals, or photo groups with varying degrees of experience and individual commitment to the craft of photography. You can be a person that just got into photography with a fixed lens camera, or that of a seasoned professional with a large bag of expensive gear. We welcome everyone as the art of photography is just that, an art and is meant to be fun!

in the Field

We aim to spend as much time as possible photographing various locations, all the while taking advantage of the best lighting and weather conditions. Our flexible schedules and smaller group sizes allow us to respond to photographic opportunities as they present themselves and be available to make location changes to our travel schedule as needed.

Your masterclass photography retreat teacher is Shawn Frederick, (click on his name to visit his personal website). He will be alongside you every step of the way to offer technical and creative advice. His assistance and encouragement to push your abilities will be at your own pace and request. He will also be offering simple pro tips to really help you gain a better understanding of the craft and how to create an eye-popping image from something that appears to be the mundane and normal. Again, this is all at your discretion as he does not have a strict guideline or academic criteria for you to follow.

Development and Editing of Your Images

The development process of any digital image is an integral part of the workflow process. It is where we define, refine and output our final image to the way we saw it in our minds. Shawn is very well-versed in numerous post processing software applications, but he will use and share tips based on using both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop in the workflow process. He is a master at image making and will share his knowledge with you daily. He urges his participants to bring a laptop with the previous mentioned image processing/editing software apps already installed. Your post processing apps should also include the Adobe RAW conversion plug-in. It can be downloaded for free in the Adobe Creative Suite where you’ve downloaded the Photoshop or Lightroom apps originally. Regardless, Shawn will be on hand to walk you through the entire digital workflow process from A-Z and really help to simplify it for you too.

Reviewing and Group Critiques

One of the most exciting and popular times of our photographic retreats are when we get together in the evenings to review and softly critique each others images in a fun slide-show setting. These sessions are 50/50 creative and technical, but are always fun and include lots of laughter and the never ending bloopers too. They allow us to draw new inspiration from each other and encourage us to push ourselves to refine our skills for producing images of a consistently high quality and taking that vision from your mind and get it into the camera. Shawn also has a few fun games and contests he does daily with all of his participants, so be on the lookout for those throughout your tour too, they’re really fun!

Last, but definitely not least…

Shawn’s goal is for you is to have a lot of fun, expand your creative and technical abilities with your camera. When you arrive home having had not just an amazing experience, but you’ll also have gained some wonderful knowledge in how to use your camera and lenses in many other scenarios that you find yourself in too. We want you to be like so many others before you, that have written us saying that took amazing pictures after they got home from using techniques they learned from spending time on a photo tour with us.

So… If you have any questions regarding our photography tours, PLEASE DO NOT HESITATE to get in touch with us. We are very happy to discuss any questions you have to the best of our best ability.