Three days ago, on March 17th, Esha Chioccio left Santa Fe for Los Angeles kicking off the longest journey of the five instructors to the Hyderabad 2017 workshop. Esha met up with Fred Roberts and Nick Souza and together, the three of them took a long jump over to Istanbul. Wendy, who had made her own way to Istanbul from Rochester via JFK was waiting for them when they arrived. At almost the exact time the four travelers were landing in Delhi, having departed Istanbul, Mike’s flight was taking off from Hong Kong to Dubai. At noon Fred, Wendy, Nick, and Esha arrived in Hyderabad and at almost the exact same time, Mike was passing overhead still enroute to Dubai…the team passing by one another within a mere 33,000 feet. 8 hours later, Mike would be back in Hyderabad, on the ground this time, having passed through Dubai airport and come back east. After nearly 100 hours of flight time (if you count the travel times of each of our team) we would meet up at the Aga Khan Academy in Hyderabad – blessedly only 15 minutes from the airport – to begin the first of the 2017 season of the Fredric Roberts Photography Workshops.

We are starting off this season in Hyderabad with a double header. We’ll be putting on an Advanced workshop for returning students followed by a new beginners class. A little more than half of our students from the previous workshop will be returning and the plan is to work on more in depth stories and to continue their technical training. For the next three days, the students will focus on two photo essays while we’ll work with them on advanced Lightroom techniques and storytelling.

The new cohort of beginners will be going through our tried and true workshop schedule with 6 days of instruction and photography followed by a graduation ceremony and an exhibition of their work. There will be one exception to our typical methodology this time however: we are engaging one of the local faculty to be an instructor for the first time in FRPW history. Vijay Srinivasan is the visual arts teacher at the Aga Khan Academy and one of our faculty trainees from the last India workshop. For this round, he’s being promoted group instructor and will be responsible for small group instruction and edits. This marks the first time that a participant has moved into an instructor role and is something we hope to see more of in our goal of eventually handing off instruction to local participants.