Farm to Table to Fine Art

A Photo Adventure with Alan Shapiro and Nick Sinnott

Some workshops teach you technique. This one takes you somewhere.

Over one extraordinary weekend, you will move through three completely different photographic worlds, each one building on the last.
You will find art in the wild abundance of a Chicago farmers market.
You will make art in an intimate still life session fueled by the morning’s own harvest and the objects that mean something to you.
And then you will transform that art through a deep, personal editing experience designed to help you see your images the way you feel them.
Finally, we will celebrate the journey together marveling at the transformations you created.

This is not a class. This is an adventure.

THE EXPERIENCE

Friday, June 26 / Welcome Dinner The weekend begins with a shared meal. Alan and Nick gather the group, talk about what’s ahead, and set the tone for a weekend of seeing differently. This is where the adventure starts.

2 sessions (Choose one or both):
Saturday, June 27 / Lincoln Park Farmers Market
Sunday, June 28 / Logan Square Farmers Market

Each morning, we head into the market at its most alive. A farmers market is a photographer’s dream: color, texture, chaos, and human connection all compressed into a few electric hours. You will work in several distinct modes, and each one will challenge you differently.

As a street photographer. The market does not slow down for you. Vendors arranging towers of tomatoes. Hands exchanging money and flowers. Strangers in conversation, children pointing, dogs pulling leashes. The energy is relentless and the light is beautiful and your job is to be quick, curious, and invisible enough to catch real moments before they disappear.

As a portrait maker. You will approach the growers themselves, the people who planted and tended and harvested what you see before you, and make environmental portraits that honor their work and their world. This is a different kind of photography. Slower. More intentional. A conversation between you and another human being, conducted through a lens.

As a still life and abstract finder. The market tables are already composing themselves without anyone’s help. Stacked peppers bleeding into each other. The geometry of a flower bucket. Roots and stems and colors that have no business being that beautiful. You will learn to see these arrangements the way an artist sees them, and photograph them that way too. This is the beginning of your still life education, happening right there in the open air.

And through it all, you will collect. Buy what catches your eye. Follow your instincts. You are not shopping. You are gathering raw material for the art you are about to make.

Then we bring the morning back to the school.

Each afternoon: The Still Life Session This is where finding art becomes making art.

The flowers, vegetables, and market discoveries you collected become the foundation. But we will ask you to bring something else with you: objects from home that carry meaning. Something cherished, something strange, something that is unmistakably yours. A found stone. An old letter. Something inherited. Something inexplicable. The things that live on your shelf and mean more than they should.

These personal objects are what will make your still lifes unlike anyone else’s in the room. They are what turn a beautiful composition into a self-portrait.

We will build. We will light. We will chase beauty and mood and the feeling that something important is happening inside the frame. We will stay as long as it takes.

Monday and Tuesday, July 13 & 14 / Editing Sessions for each group (July 13th – Lincoln Park Group, July 14th – Logan Square Group). (Virtual)
This is where the image becomes art.

Alan’s editing philosophy is not about simple correction. It is not about making your photograph look the way the scene looked. It is about making your photograph feel the way the scene felt, and then pushing further than that into territory you could not have predicted when you pressed the shutter.

A little. A little more. Then a place unimagined.

You will learn to heighten drama without announcing it. To deepen mood without manufacturing it. To make decisions that feel inevitable in retrospect.
Both Saturday and Sunday cohorts come together here, and the conversation is as much a part of the learning as the editing itself.

Monday, July 28 / Image Celebration (Virtual)
We gather one last time to share what we made. You show your work to people who were there with you when you made it, who watched you build that composition, who know what was in the frame and what you chose to do with it afterward. That shared context changes everything about how it feels to show your work.

THE DETAILS
This workshop is intentionally small. The experience depends on it.

Each session is a complete four-part experience:

• Welcome dinner, Friday June 26th
• A full day finding art at the market and then making art in the studio
• A virtual editing masterclass, July 14th or 15th
• A virtual image celebration, Monday July 28

Saturday, June 27 / Lincoln Park Farmers Market: $995
Sunday, June 28 / Logan Square Farmers Market: $995

Interested in attending both Saturday and Sunday: $1,795

About Alan Shapiro
Alan Shapiro came to photography the way the best things happen: sideways and by surprise.

He spent decades as a global storyteller at the highest levels of advertising, ultimately serving as Chief Creative Officer at Omnicom, the world’s largest agency network, collaborating with some of the most talented image-makers on the planet. He watched. He learned. He got envious. Then a friend handed him a camera and nothing was ever the same.

What followed was not a hobby. It was a second life. His work has appeared in launch campaigns for Apple and Nikon, on the sets of The Good Doctor and Sex and the City, in Ritz Carlton Hotels and Bose retail stores worldwide, and in private and corporate collections too numerous to count. He shoots street portraiture, still life, food, floral macro, and landscape with equal obsession, guided by a visual sensibility shaped by the Renaissance Masters and wabi-sabi philosophy: the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and impermanence.

But as much as Alan loves making images, he loves teaching them. His style is high-energy and deeply personal. He does not teach technique for its own sake. He teaches seeing. He teaches feeling. He teaches you to interrupt your defaults and make photographs that mean something rather than simply look correct.

He is a Creative Catalyst, a lifelong madman, and one of the most genuinely exciting people you will ever follow into a farmer’s market with a camera.

About Nick Sinnott
Nick Sinnott is a photographer, educator, and the Owner & Director of Chicago Photography Classes, one of the Midwest’s largest and longest-running photography schools. Since taking ownership in 2014, Nick has helped grow the school into a thriving photographic community offering more than 25 classes each session, serving hundreds of students across both Chicago and Highland Park locations.

Known for his approachable teaching style and passion for photographic education, Nick specializes in helping photographers of all experience levels better understand both the technical and creative sides of image-making. His teaching emphasizes not only camera operation and editing, but also learning to truly “see” light, composition, and storytelling.

Nick is a longtime user of the Olympus / OM-System camera platform and frequently incorporates modern computational photography techniques into his work and instruction. His photographic interests range from macro and landscape photography to architecture, monochrome imagery, and creative long-exposure techniques. His personal work often focuses on the changing character of Chicago and the Midwest, especially during winter conditions.

Beyond the classroom, Nick is deeply committed to building photographic community through workshops, photo meet-ups, travel experiences, printing education, and mentorship opportunities. Under his leadership, Chicago Photography Classes has become known not only for technical education, but also for fostering an encouraging and collaborative environment for photographers at every stage of their journey.