There’s a question I get fairly often from photographers who are thinking about working with me through Savvy Shutterbug:
‘Is this like a photography workshop?’
The short answer is no. The longer answer is worth understanding — because the difference isn’t just structural. It changes what you walk away with.
Workshops are valuable. I’ve taken them, taught in them, and I’m not dismissing them. But workshops and mentoring solve different problems. If you’ve taken workshops and still feel stuck, that’s probably not because the workshops were bad. It’s because workshops aren’t designed to do what mentoring does.
Here’s what actually happens when someone works with me one-on-one.
Before the Session Even Starts
Mentoring starts with context, not curriculum.
Before I work with someone, I want to know where they are and where they’re trying to go. Not in a vague ‘I want to get better’ way — in a specific way. What kind of photography are you doing? What are you being hired for (or what do you want to be hired for)? What does ‘better’ mean to you right now — technically, stylistically, commercially?
I also want to see your work before we meet. Not to evaluate you, but to understand you. What you’ve been shooting tells me more about what you need than anything you’d say in a description. Someone who says they want to improve their natural light portraits and sends me work where the compositions are consistently strong but the exposures are flat — that tells me something specific about where to focus our time.
A workshop can’t do this. A workshop has to build content for the median student, which means it’s probably not quite right for you.
What the Session Itself Looks Like
No two sessions are identical, but they tend to move through a few consistent phases.
We look at your work — together, out loud
The first thing we usually do is pull up your recent images and go through them together. Not for me to tell you what’s wrong with them. For us to look at them the way a thoughtful, honest colleague would — talking through what’s working, what’s not, and why.
This part is uncomfortable for some photographers at first. Most of us don’t have a lot of experience receiving direct, substantive feedback about our images in real time. But it’s also where some of the most useful things happen.
When I say ‘this one is almost there — what do you think is off about it?’ and you have to articulate an answer, you’re doing something that passive learning — watching a tutorial, listening to a lecture — doesn’t require of you. You’re diagnosing. And diagnosing your own work is a skill that improves your shooting in ways that no preset or technique can.
We identify what’s actually in the way
After looking at your work, something usually becomes clear about what’s actually holding you back. And it’s often not what the photographer expected when they came in.
Sometimes it’s a perceptual thing — they’re not reading light the way they need to. Sometimes it’s a confidence thing — they’re hesitating at the wrong moments and missing the shot. Sometimes it’s a workflow thing — they’re spending so much time in post that they’ve stopped being honest with themselves about whether the image was good when they took it.
These things don’t get identified in a workshop because there’s no space for the individual diagnosis. Everyone gets the same teaching regardless of what they actually need.
We practice — specifically, in real time
Once we know what we’re working on, we work on it. That might mean going outside with your camera and practicing a specific skill while I watch and give you real-time feedback. It might mean pulling up Lightroom and working through your editing habits together. It might mean talking through scenarios — how would you handle this lighting situation, what would you do differently in this session — until the thinking becomes automatic.
The practice is specific to you. Not ‘here’s how to use a reflector’ in a general sense, but ‘here’s what you specifically tend to do when the light is coming from this direction, and here’s what I want you to try instead.’
We end with something concrete to take away
Every session ends with something specific to work on before we meet again. Not a vague ‘practice more’ directive — a concrete assignment that targets what we identified in the session.
That assignment matters because growth in photography doesn’t happen in the mentoring session itself. It happens in the time between sessions, when you’re shooting with intentionality and then bringing what you made back for us to look at together.
Why This Works Differently Than Anything Else
I want to be honest about this: mentoring is not faster than a workshop in the short term. A workshop gives you a lot of information in a short time. You leave with notes, handouts, maybe some in-the-field experience. It feels productive.
Mentoring is slower at first. The first session is largely diagnostic. You might leave feeling like you learned less than you did in a two-day workshop.
But what changes is durability. The things you work through in mentoring — the specific patterns in your shooting, the precise skills you need to develop, the mental habits that are holding you back — those things stay changed in a way that workshop information rarely does.
Six months after a workshop, most photographers have retained maybe twenty percent of the content. Six months after a good mentoring relationship, most photographers are shooting fundamentally differently than they were when we started.
That’s not a knock on workshops. It’s just what individualized, practice-based learning does.
Who Mentoring Is For
Not everyone is ready for mentoring, and I’d rather be honest about that upfront than have someone invest in sessions that aren’t the right fit.
Mentoring works best for photographers who are past the absolute beginner stage — you know how your camera works, you’ve been shooting for at least several months, you have some sense of what you’re trying to do. The work is about refinement and development, not starting from zero.
It also requires a willingness to be uncomfortable. Looking at your work critically, having someone point out specific patterns in your shooting, trying things that feel unfamiliar — that’s the work. If you’re looking for validation rather than growth, mentoring will be frustrating.
But if you’re at a point where you feel stuck — where you’ve been shooting for a while and the growth has flattened, where you know something is off but you can’t quite name it, where you’ve watched a lot of videos and taken a workshop or two and you’re still not where you want to be — that’s exactly where mentoring tends to work.
If that’s where you are, I’d be glad to talk. The contact form on the Savvy Shutterbug page is the best place to start — tell me a little about where you are and what you’re working on, and we’ll figure out from there whether this is a good fit.
