Inspired by a mix of wonderful people I know, I have put together two mentorship programs for Indigenous Photographers beginning in 2022. One program will be completely virtual and open to Indigenous photographers across Canada. The second one is for a photographer to learn about night photography and teaching photography with the end goal of being my assistant at a Women’s Night Photography Retreat in the NWT, March 15-19 2023. Applications are open until December 28, 2021. If you’d like to apply or share this opportunity with someone you know or a community, here are the application pages:
Indigenous Photographer Night Photography and Teaching Mentorship Program
I want to give a big thank you to the companies that are sponsoring the night photography mentorship program and making the opportunity even more accessible for the mentee: Blachford Lake Lodge, The Camera Store and the Juniper Hotel. Their generosity is helping make this program even better than I had initially imagined.
A formalized mentorship program creates space to find answers to questions you may not even know to ask. As a mentor, I want to provide a lot of elements, from accountability to pushing your creativity to teaching you about technical and business aspects of photography. Both programs I am offering allow us to adapt to a person’s needs, regardless of starting points.
I hope to enable my mentees to access opportunities in the genres of photography related to the outdoors, such as landscape and night photography.
The journey that brought me to my current place with my photography wasn’t direct, and it wasn’t straightforward. I have no formal education in photography; I took physics and mathematics in university. But I like to try new things. I am analytical and independent, and perhaps I am too independent. I have always been terrible at asking for help. Even when I know that people are willing to answer questions and have directly told me so.
The first time I ever went out to the shoot the Milky Way, I went with a group of three strangers (I know this sounds sketchy, but I did it mostly safely), and one of them, Stephen Hancock, did do workshops on how to shoot the Milky Way. I didn’t want to bother him, though. I had looked up information online and did my best with that. And, yes, Stephen did ask if I needed any help. Maybe if I had taken him up on that, my focus wouldn’t have been slightly off. I learned from my mistakes and immersed myself in learning everything I could about night photography. A mentor would have been wonderful to have, but hindsight is 20/20.
So, I am putting myself forward as a woman who can help, take action and make space. The mentees will know I am there to assist them, but I won’t leave it up to them to come to me. We’ll design a program to keep everyone on track, asking questions, and developing.
If you would like to book some mentorship sessions for yourself, I do have virtual mentorship packages available.