End of Year Competition Results - Judge: Elliot Stern

End Of Year Judge - Elliot Stern

Thanks to his dad, Elliot has been involved with things photographic since he was about 5 years old and working in his dad's darkroom. His passion for the art and what can be created through photographic capture has grown stronger year after year.

His dad now 93 years old , taught him a great deal about photography and it has been a most wonderful experience for Elliot to teach his dad digital photography. Even at 93 he is still shooting pictures and printing them.

Elliot's career, which spans over fifty years if he includes his dad's darkroom, has taken him into many different areas of the photographic world. He has been a portrait photographer, wedding photographer, photo journalist, nature and scenic photographer, architectural photographer, military photographer, and a recorder of memories and history in those capacities. He has lectured, performed classes, and educated countless numbers of people about photography and digital workflow across the country and now wants to bring his experiences and knowledge to Blue Ridge Workshops.

He worked for Nikon for 33 years, selling and teaching and it gave him the incredible opportunity to be in the forefront of the digital revolution and certainly gave him the opportunity to learn all of the new technologies and deal with all of the challenges that those technologies brought with them. Having dealt with all those challenges has helped him teach the concepts of digital imaging and digital work flow to a great many aspiring photographers.

After retiring from Nikon, Elliot worked in the Photo Retail end of the business, always hoping to create a company like Blue Ridge Workshops which would allow him to do the things he loved most, which was shoot images and teach. While in retail he did very advanced classes on Nikon single lens reflex cameras, and digital workflow.

The workshops that he now gives at Blue Ridge Workshops are very important to Elliot. They give him an opportunity to pass on his knowledge and experiences to others in a comfortable, easy to learning environment. By becoming the educator and bringing in other educators, each with their own particular slants on photography, he is finally achieving his dream - creating some of the best photography workshops available. He enjoys teaching others and expanding their knowledge, so they can record their world in new, different and creative ways. Your images today can influence your world of tomorrow and tell your story in a way that nothing else can.

Elliot's current choice of equipment is Nikon Digital Single lens reflex cameras and lenses and flashes. But as Elliot has quite often stated, "there is not a bad digital single lens reflex in the market place. They are all capable of producing incredible images, but never on their own."