Whew! What a week it was last week… Last Wednesday, I brought pal and photog instructor guru Zack Arias into my studio for another episiode of chasejarvisLIVE. We chatted photography for 2 hours and took questions from the live Twitter audience via #cjlive. Was a blast. While about 20,000 of you caught the interview LIVE–it seemed like I got at least that many tweets/emails/fbook requests to post it again here on the blog, so… As you wish. Here ’tis.
From there, we shipped Zack and his crew into our creativeLIVE studio where he put on one heckuva studio lighting course all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Hopefully you saw the interwebs booming, especially with the @creativeLIVE and #askzack tags. I’m pretty sure Zack swiped some ratings from the World Cup. Or at least we had fun trying. I wanted to give a huge shoutout to Zack and his team for an amazing effort. You guys and gals nailed it. Also a shoutout also to all the manufacturers that kicked in gear for Zack to give away, as well as uber thanks to B&H Photo Video for their support of the creativeLIVE studio and G-Technology for keeping our gobs and gobs of data safe. They support us, please support them. I hope lots of you tuned in. And if you didn’t but wished you had, the course is available for download here.
While I’ve got you, I wanted to ask for your feedback. Not somebody else’s…YOURS. In the comments below, we’re looking to find out a few things with the goal of making creativeLIVE the best it can be. Tell us whatever you want, but please help us by answering some or all of the following particulars about our LIVE, free, worldwide creative education platform:
1. What makes the creativeLIVE approach different, better, worse? How does our class format compare to others?
2. Where do you live? We want to understand the breadth of our audience with the comments on this post. Where are you from, and when are you watching the LIVE feed?
3. Does this live worldwide format really work? This is the important part. What does the experience feel like to you? Can you help describe this format to someone who’s never seen it?
Thanks for taking the time! If you’re new here, I invite you to subscribe/follow via links above and to the right. Lots more stuff heading your way soon on all our channels…
Q1. Not sure it is unique, not in the long history of teaching and learning, but it was certainly worthwhile. It was interesting to me to see the TriCaster in action in such a robust event.
Q2. Athens, GA. Viewed the workshop on campus at UGA, so I had plenty of bandwidth. I do wonder how it would have gone at home over my DSL connection. I guess Zach went to UGA, where he said he almost flunked out. When was that? Where did he finally finish up?
Q3. I thought the format worked really well, though I would personally prefer to be in a live (f2f) classroom. Still, Zach was able to successfully make his points using this “live TV” approach. Obviously, the event was way, way, way too long to actually sit through and absorb. I had to dip in and out. Zach and the production crew must have been exhausted after the final session.
All in all, it was a positive experience and I’m glad I was able to participate and gain from Zach’s deep knowledge and experience.
Well done.
1. well i’m just impressed. i think mostly because it is live. you just can’t hide mistakes when the whole thing is live – which makes it all very honest. it’s not prerecorded shit like someone giving you a kind of video tutorial which is not much more than a somehow illustrated handbook. these things won’t help you much. i have many of these tutorials in my office and now make an educated guess: how many times do i watch these vids? yep, once – what a shame…
and now here he is: mr. zack arias keeping me up all night (for three days) after a ten hour shift… astonishing. he’s not only an excellent educator, he also has a huge woman acceptance factor =) “honey, i won’t go to bed there’s zack arias teaching live on the internet…” “oh, that great photog you always talking about? cool, g’night…”
to sum up: good business model, good production, information worth at least two years of study and most important: much fun.
2. germany, northern part. precisely outskirts of hannover. which explains typographic errors in the english language (if you find one you can keep it).
3. well i think so. we live in a time where many of us simply want to learn new things and we find out that most of these things we cannot learn in our own urban environment. so the idea of a live classroom broadcast is a good step. i even stayed up all night to watch this live feed (crazy). you almost get the feeling that you are in that studio together with these other guys… amazing! forget the worldcup =)
ok, after all the pro’s now the con’s: more coordination during live video transmission. even a zack arias is a predictable human being. if a camera wants to show zack canon display after a shot to let us see the “blinkies” (thanks, moose) focus hunting is a pain. i know its hard but i think that just needs some practise and direction from the producer. also the questions from the web and the whole chat thing seemed a little out of control.
all in all, well done. keep it up!
1. the live format is fun because it is spontaneous, and in general I liked it
2. I live in Northern CA
3. Yes w reservations. Offering a FREE seminar w someone as skilled and entertaining as Zach is really, really great and I very much appreciated the opportunity to view it. What would, I believe, really improve the seminars is if they were either 1) split into different skill/experience levels, or 2) a rough schedule w detailed topics and times was available so those can either skip the more basic stuff (like, if you incr ISO from 100 to 200, decrease SS or ap by one stop), or watch them (as need be). Zach has so much to teach other photographers of all levels and I’m sure it is very difficult to teach to a wide range of audience skill/experience levels, but mixing in so much very basic stuff with more advanced stuff didn’t seem very efficient to me. I would be very interested in purchasing a CD if it contained a more focused skill level (according to my needs), but I don’t think I would buy this particular CD set since it has so much info that is not at my particular level. Not sure how you guys can balance such things and still keep things spontaneous and free to view -but I hope you try! Thanks again for the opportunity to watch Zach at work.
New Castle! YES! 🙂
A fantastic way to spend a couple hours . . . felt like I was sitting on the other side of the couch . . . This was just amazing!