Judge: Becky Jaffe A photographer, naturalist, and educator living in Oakland, California, Becky Jaffe is active in the Bay Area photography community, teaching Art of Seeing courses for advanced fine art photographers, curating group exhibits in galleries and greenhouses, and judging competitions at the Berkeley Camera Club, the Contra Costa Camera Club, and the Alameda Photographic Society. She is the 2019 Artist-in-Residence at the University of California’s Botanical Garden at Berkeley, where she has served as a docent for over a decade. She is fortunate to teach photography and art history internationally as a lecturer for Cal Discoveries Travel. In her dedicated photography practice, she uses in-camera techniques that stretch the photographic medium to create painterly effects, fusing an artist’s sensibility with a biologist’s curiosity in order to communicate reverence for the natural world.  Her photographs have been recognized by the California Academy of Sciences, the Center for Fine Art Photography, the Entomological Society of America, the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco, and have been published in The Buddhist Poetry Review, Bay Nature Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and National Geographic’s Your Shot. She is represented by the Abrams Claghorn Gallery in Albany, California.

Photoshop Compositing by Charles Ginsburgh This is an 8 session (16 week) Study Group in compositing within Photoshop. This Study Group is designed to further our experience with, and our skill in, creating composites within Photoshop (and for the most part Photoshop Elements). These sessions are held virtually via ZOOM.  Dates are every other Wednesday starting on Feb 15th then every other week We do not discuss the use of Lightroom in this setting, as this application is not conducive to the creation of composites. The goal here was not to make ourselves into advanced Photoshop Composite Artists, but to: Become more familiar with Photoshop editing Become more aware as to the concepts and subtle aspect of within our images that impact how we perceive them Become better composite creators Discover ways how composites might help our everyday Photography Challenge our imagination and creativity At the completion of these sessions, students are much more comfortable with Photoshop editing, are more willing to try out some of the options Photoshop has to offer, and have a greater appreciation of the subtle aspects of our images that impact the viewer. Students also become much more aware as to how even the most simple composites can enhance our everyday photography. This Study Group includes: General Compositing Tutorial Videos and technical materials (technical notes and practice images) Access to compositing tutorials demonstrating the execution of several different independent projects  Assigned Projects. Both the project concepts and all starting materials will be provided. This study group is not intended to be a passive event, but an active “hands-on” series of sessions where students are required to complete, share and comment upon project assignments. Students failing to consistently do so are respectively asked to leave the group. The bulk of the “hands on” training will be in completing the assigned projects, and that is where most of t