Here are a few tips on how to prepare for your upcoming workshop experience.

If you are feeling a little apprehensive, a little excited about your upcoming workshop, that's fine—it's to be expected and actually beneficial. It will be a week you will remember the rest of your life.

Tips to help you prepare for the experience.

The most important thing about a workshop is your attitude. Most people who come to a workshop are excited and eager to learn new ways to do what they love doing the most—that is creating images. But, if you come to be entertained, looking for applause for your work, or just want to dabble a few hours each day, you will be disappointed and will leave with far less than others will who have totally invested themselves in the experience.

Set Goals

Before you leave home, spend some time thinking about why you feel taking a workshop will be valuable to your life. Write down a list of six things that you wish to achieve during your workshop. That list might include: an honest critique of your work, new techniques to free your creative spirit, new ways to work, a better understanding of the medium and your place in it—all these are good reasons.

Take Notes and Record the Lectures

Things happen fast during a workshop, and you will want to relive the experience later, at a slower pace, when you get home. Do not edit or select those things you feel at the moment are important. While not everything you experience will have equal value, only time —a few months —will give you the objectivity to sort out what the experience here really meant. So, write it all down - especially your feelings about what's happening inside you.

Your Day

Being a photographer gets you up out of bed in the early morning to experience the quality of light at dawn. Being up so early also lets you see a land and its people in their innocence, before the glare of the full sun sends them into hiding. Traveling through the world as a photographer is to experience the lives of others and other cultures to a greater depth than do most other travelers. Photographers and journalists have permission to stop strangers, interrupt farmers, and ask people to pose for a photograph but do so with respect and except their privacy if requested.