The great thing about community is diversity. It is within that diversity that great things are created and moved forward. I’ve been participating in the local photography meetup group since August of 2007 and watched it really take off with members, education and outings. It has been a great experience and I’ve loved helping out. When someone else learns something, you can not help but learn something new yourself.

Recently the leader of the group and fantastic nature photographer Rich Nicoloff decided a change was in order and asked if I would step up to leading the members. I’m not the type to just jump into things without thinking. Being an assistant and helping the group through excursions and some lessons is one thing taking the charge of it all is quite another. After a week of thought and consultation with another fantastic group member, photographer and organizer Jeremy Kuster, I decided I would take the reigns but also share the weight with him. Jeremy is another upstanding individual who takes his work seriously.

We have a lot to do and not a lot of time between the hours to do it in. We’re going to be working on growing the group, expanding lessons for beginners and intermediates while slowly getting some advanced curriculums into the pipeline. Our plans are to raise up further members into more assistants who can lead outings of their own and ask more of our pro community to come over and share some of their wisdom with the eager crowd. The group has some fantastic possibilities for growth and I am lucky to be able to help spearhead that in our region.

If you are in Charlotte and a beginner to professional please reach out and join us. The only rule we have is to leave ego and drama at the door. This is a space of learning, exploration, and growth. If you think you’ve learned it all or are not willing to participate then you need to find another group. We believe that everyone has something to learn and you learn through participation.

If you are not in Charlotte think about helping your local photog groups out. There are many entering the profession or just wanting to learn their P&S better and that’s good. Reach out, make a new friend, connection, network, resource, by paying it forward today.

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Tags: community, karma, local, meetup, photographers

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Outreach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.