WKU Mountain Workshops to Meet in Paducah

As Brittany Greeson, a Western Kentucky University photojournalism student who was taking a break from school and interning at the Flint Journal, arrived at the 2015 edition of the Mountain Workshops in Frankfort, she said that the feeling of failure was on her mind. The pressure to perform at the Mountain can be intense.   

“What people don’t realize is that once they think you’re halfway decent at your job, there is more and more pressure to be better at doing it,” Greeson said. “You start thinking to yourself that you can’t fail.” And that adds to the pressure even before the Mountain begins.  

After spending time during the first few hours of the workshop with her peers, colleagues and her professional coach, Lisa Krantz, of the San Antonio Express-News, she quickly figured out that the building blocks of success are actually built upon several small steps of failure.  

“I realized that failure is actually a good thing,” Greeson said. “Participating at the workshops helped me to learn the process of telling a story in one week’s time, maybe even in one day. The shot count helped me immensely,”

Greeson said speaking of the workshops frame limitation in the photojournalism workshop.

“It really teaches you how to compose an image and search for the meaningful moment and not just click away. To be more thoughtful.”    

Being thoughtful is what Greeson did that week last October as she conquered her fear of failure and made several memorable images, some of these images will join the workshop’s collective 40-year history of visual story-telling of the Commonwealth.

Her images wowed many and caught the attention of her coach, which lead her to find a summer internship at the San Antonio Express-News.  

“The Mountain was helpful for networking but more importantly it helped me learn about who I am as a photographer. I’m drawn to longer term work and the Mountain Workshops helped me realize that,” Greeson said.

The Mountain’s real mission statement is about education, but the results of the project can be breath taking.  

The 2016 edition of the annual Mountain Workshops, a 41 internationally  recognized collection of simultaneous photojournalism, video  storytelling, picture editing, data visualization and time-lapse workshops, will be held October 18-22 in Paducah.

Held each year in towns throughout Kentucky, the workshops cover a gamut of skills that enable photographers to better tell stories about the surrounding community while learning from professional visual storytellers, many of them recognized as some of the best contemporary journalists of our time.    

About 150 participants, faculty and staff will converge on the western Kentucky river town to produce documentary shorts, still images, visual graphics and time-lapse photography that will be presented in a book, website and traveling gallery.  

The application process is portfolio driven and all participants must present a portfolio of work to be considered for admission to the workshop.  

To see a complete description of all five workshops please visit http://www.mountainworkshops.org/about