Instructor Bios
Jack Alter, co-owner of Alter Images; a partnership that started in 1980 photographing weddings and portraits. Mr. Alter created and teaches an award-winning photography program at Lincoln High School in San Francisco. His classes meet the standards for admission to the University of California and the California State Colleges. He has taught photography for over twenty years to San Francisco teens.
Dave Christensen is a San Francisco based photographer, with a background in fine arts photography as well as an extensive successful commercial photography background, with over 30 years experience in photography. Having been hired and in charge of major advertising campaigns for such noted companies as: Levi Strauss, Shaklee Corporation, and Columbia Recording Studios, are just an example of the caliber of the client’s he has worked with. Dave has also been an instructor for several years with the SF Photo Center, and offers a vital and unique perspective on many facets, principals, collective elements, structure and key components within photography, all tailored personally towards the student’s vision and growth, thus expanding his/her approach, awareness and execution, all adding to the success of the finished presented image. Building and adding upon the knowledge and skills we each bring to a photograph, and how we approach photography with “our tools”, are part of the journey, while adding invaluable knowledge, technique and support that as an instructor I am excited and motivated to pass on to my students.
Lee Donehower is New Jersey born and raised and stopped off in Nebraska for twenty-five years before moving to the Bay Area in 1996. He started with a 620 box camera in 1956 and today uses a Canon EOS D-30 digital camera with interchangeable lenses. In the sixties he had a black & white darkroom in his parents’ laundry room, started processing his own color film in the seventies, and moved into digital photography in the nineties. For the past two years he has taught Photoshop and Photoshop Elements at the Diablo Valley Macintosh Users Group in the East Bay. He also produces Photoshop & Photoshop Elements training videos on his website.
Robert Elvin holds degrees in social anthropology, commercial photography and fine art photography from the University of Minnesota, City College of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute Respectively. Commercial clients in the bay area have included Pacific Telesis Corp., Maggie Williams Public Relations, The San Francisco Wine exchange and numerous independent clients. Mr. Elvin has taught lighting at the San Francisco Photography Center since 1988. For the last ten years he has worked primarily with motion picture lighting and has been the principal technical support person for Photographers Lighting in San Francisco. He is currently in post- production on The Savant; a film written and directed by him and released in Oct 08.
Dianne Jones has been working in the bay area for the last 12 years. She teaches photography at Skyline College in San Bruno, CA and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. In addition to teaching, Dianne owns and operates her own photography business in Berkeley, volunteers for high-school photography programs, and has produced/coordinated numerous lectures and events in the Bay Area. For the last seven years she has been making photographs that explore evidence of the rapidly changing landscape throughout California. Some recent photographic and installation projects include work at the 40th Street Cut, Oakland Art Gallery, Urbanism Studies, The Quarterly at Latham Square, Mini Show, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, New Visions, Pro Arts, Two Artists, Gallery 555, Oakland Museum of California, The Exhibition Landscape, Moldova Young Artists Association, and Transient Landscape Art Space. She has exhibited her photographs nationally and internationally and some of her work has been in publications such as Wire Magazine, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Metro Active, Creative Alliance Peek Review, and The Oakland Tribune. She received a M.F.A. in studio art from Mills College in 2001. You can see Dianne’s work at: http://www.diannejones.com
Australian-born photographer Christine Krieg has travel running through her veins. She was hooked after flying over the Amazon while photographing mile-high Angel Falls in 1991. Since then she has photographed and written about many exotic and beautiful places including Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Australia and Borneo. She loves to share her passion for the world we live in and her knowledge of photography with everyone she meets. She has been an instructor with Image Quest Tours for the last three years. Presently based in San Francisco, she owns a photography business specializing in people and places. Visit Christine’s websites:http://www.cksworld.com and http://www.cksweddings.com
Laura Miller owned and operated Colorarts Photographics for 20 years. Her business was a custom lab for exhibiting photo artists and galleries, as well as a rental darkroom and teaching facility. She has over 25 years experience as a freelance photographer and specialized in fine art reproduction and exhibition quality prints. She is currently expanding into graphic design, photo editing, and enjoys exploring current digital output options as well as traditional, fine-art photography printing techniques. She has been teaching photography and color printing for 15 years.
Shane Powers has been teaching photography to youth and adults for most of the past decade. Shane hails from the Wild West town of Boise, Idaho and is one class away from his MFA in Photography at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. In 2003, he founded a comprehensive, year-long photojournalism program with 80 high school students in six Boise-area high schools called focus208, which was featured in PDN Magazine. He is now a veteran volunteer member of the Mission District’s artist collective Red Poppy Art House, and he also volunteers as a youth photography mentor for First Exposures, a program conducted by SF Camerawork. Shane’s first love is working with old medium and large format cameras and historical processes, but he’s no slacker when it comes to the newfangled digital media. Websites: http://www.shanepowersphoto.com and http://www.shanepowersweddings.com
Facebook Fan Page: Shane Powers Photography
Michael Starkman, M.F.A., is a fine art photographer based in San Francisco. He has been assistant professor of art at Southeastern Louisiana University and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His work is held in public and private collections including the Georgia Museum, the Kennedy Museum of Art, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and the Hollar Gallery in Prague. His recent exhibitions include the Foto and Photo Festival in Cesano Maderno, Italy and Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco.
Kristen Stehle received her MFA in photography at the Academy of Art University. She photographed her thesis project with a Holga plastic camera. Kristen’s plastic camera images can be viewed on her website: http://www.kristenstehle.com
Joseph Untalan is a self taught photographer since high school when he used his father’s old Kodak Retina IIIc, a completely manual 35 mm camera with a built in light meter. Joseph runs a company, Camera Lucida, where he photographs artwork, mostly paintings. 3 years ago he took Steve Kiser’s class in the Zone System at City College of San Francisco. Since then photography has become deliberate. He can now pre-visualize how his negatives will print. He bought a densitometer on eBay, and calibrated his and friends’ film. His friends encouraged him to teach this class now offered at the Photography Center.
Roxanne Worthington owns Last Avenue Studio and has taught photography classes in the Bay Area for several years. She started her photography career taking classes at U.C. Berkeley Extension where she had the good fortune to learn the skill and art of photography from many of the Bay Area’s finest photographers. She is an active and productive photographer who has shown her work both nationally and internationally.
Mitsu Yoshikawa was born in Japan. He studied photography at the Academy of Art University from 1971 to 1973 under Peter Stackpole, one of four original staff photographers for Life magazine. In 1973, he moved to New York and worked as a freelancer. He spent years shooting for travel magazines, newspapers, followed by expanding into publishing and microfilm processing managment. Subsequently, he emigrated to San Francisco in 1984 and continued his microfilm work at Xerox Corporation. While there, he began publishing annual calendars featuring local scenes he had captured. In 1994, he received a Bronze prize from California Art Magazine’s annual contest. He began focusing on black and white photography using a large format (4X5”) camera in 2006.Currently, he photographs nature and wilderness scenes of the San Francisco Bay Area, working to show not only details, but also the feeling of the nature around us.