Who will be your photographic tutor and mentor on your Cao Roads Photography Tour?

 

Cao Roads Travel is pleased to introduce you to Mr Rob Smith, a creative and inspiring photographer from Australia.

Rob has 45+ years of experience in photography and was a professional photographer and videographer for the final decade before retirement. He is an accredited judge at national (Australian) and international levels, with a deep understanding of the technical and craft principles of photography, graphic design, and multimedia production. His true passion, however, is in practising photography as an art form, and helping other photographers to develop their own vision, expression and style. Rob will inspire you to look beyond the obvious and to see things in different ways—to discover.

Rob helps the beginner to understand the fundamentals of photography and know that it is really their imagination, commitment and personal vision that are the keys to becoming a better photographer.

Rob also tells photographers not to worry about whether they need a more expensive camera or lenses to be better photographers. You don’t. If you have a camera with interchangeable lenses and manual as well as automatic controls, you have all that you need to gain valuable experience on your Cao Roads Photography Tour with Rob Smith as your guide. It’s not what you use that’s important, it’s how you learn to use it.

There will be ample opportunities on your Cao Roads Photography Tour to take photographs that document your holiday.  However, it will be Rob’s mission to inspire you to make photographs that communicate how you feel about places or things, rather than simply what they look like. This is the critical distinction between photography as a recording medium and photography as an art form. For Rob, the latter embodies the true joy of photography.

Beginners in photography often feel overwhelmed by the technology; the craft and the ‘rules’. Rob is an inspiring and nurturing teacher with the ability to cut through the fog and give beginners the confidence to be creative at an early stage.

Speaking of ‘rules’, Rob collects quotes from artists of all descriptions. They inspire him and keep him on the path of creativity.  Here’s what a very famous photographer had to say about rules:

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs”

ANSEL ADAMS

As your tutor, Rob will help you to understand what Ansel Adams meant, and quickly give you the confidence to start making your own good—or great—photographs, whatever your level of experience.

Rob has a wealth of experience in delivering workshops and presenting about creative photography at seminars, conferences and photographic clubs. His presentations are renowned for being rich and inspiring multimedia  experiences for audiences. But you won’t have to take our word for that.

On some evenings during your Cao Roads Photography Tour, Rob will deliver some of his acclaimed photography presentations and answer your questions. You’ll gain insights into his creative processes and see how photography and video can be combined with environmental sounds and music to create rich multimedia presentations for your own work.

On other evenings during your tour, there will be opportunities to review some images that you and other tour members have made during the day. With the aid of a digital projector, Rob will explain and demonstrate the fundamentals of Adobe Lightroom—his principal processing tool— and show you how to make your images look their best with this inexpensive yet powerful software.

Imagine what value you will derive from your Cao Roads Photography Tour when you receive professional feedback on your images during an evening session and then go out the next day to put what you have learned into practise. See, learn, do! As a tour group, our mission is to inspire all members to tread new ground and encourage each other. It’s not a competition.

When you finish your photography tour with Cao Roads Travel—and employ the principles that Rob teaches—you will return to your home and see your familiar environment in different ways. You will see wonderful photographic opportunities that you have not seen before. You will be a more aware and creative photographer.

For now, we would like to leave you with some inspiring words from your tutor.

“Sharing my passion for photography with others and playing a part in helping them to derive more enjoyment from their photography is a joy.

I’m  passionate because of photography’s promise—that I will improve as I grow older and become more perceptive. As long as I retain my critical faculties of vision, mind, and a degree of manual dexterity, I know that I will continue to grow as a photographer. How good is that? Well, it’s priceless! How many other pursuits can promise me that?

 

It’s about maturity of vision and imagination—envisioning things and consistently realising them in artistic images.”  ROB SMITH

 

Does “photography’s promise” appeal to you? Join us on tour with Rob Smith.