Creative Live/Vincent Laforet’s wrapped up a fantastic three-day over-the-web seminar/workshop today. It got me thinking about the future of photography workshops on the web. Here are five predictions:
Those are my five predictions. Of course I have a couple of other notes about the event, so keep reading if you’re interested.
There was lots of international groaning about video and/or audio loss in the chat rooms. Stable, high-speed internet will be global someday, but it’s pretty clear that day isn’t here yet.
Not only was Vincent Laforet hosting the workshop, but Chase Jarvis was part of it and so was Art Wolfe. Talk about a trifecta! So here’s my bonus prediction– really successful events will also involve local celebrities — celebrities in the context of the event. Chase and Art are some of the biggest A-list Seattle photographers out there. Great choice, Creative Live!
The average number of participants at any one time seemed to be about 1200 (1700 the first day)– but those figures are a little misleading. They are for only the live event and appeared to be just the people that stuck with it the entire time. Not everyone tuned in for the entire event (roughly 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. three days in a row) and there were also daily web re-feeds of the content which had even more people. I think I heard a moderator mention they had recorded 40K unique hits to the event on day one alone. In the future, web workshop audiences will grow as internet connections and computer use expands around the world.
Just my two-cents anyway. This was easily the coolest on-line seminar/workshop/event I’ve participated in to date and I’m really looking forward to the future of photography workshops like this!
