If the family holiday photos are a bit askew, your ski trip images are a whiteout, or you simply feel you could do better, we have the solution.  Some of our favorite professionals will share specialized photography tips and techniques in a series of hands-on workshops designed to address specific interests.  Working with your own camera (or iPhone/smart phone), you will follow our experts and learn to maximize effect in various situations. This series is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Southern California’s Evolving Landscape: The Photography of Helen Lukens Gaut (1872-1955), which is on display at PMH through Feburary 26.

Image: Pasadena City Hall, courtesy James Staub

Workshop 1, February 4: Working the Angles with James Staub, Photo Services Specialist, California Institute of Technology

     Learn to work with your camera effectively to bring your own perspective to subjects and situations often not considered.  With Pasadena City Hall and the adjoining urban landscape as our subjects, we’ll focus on:

• “Moving the furniture around" -- methods to enliven a photograph through simple changes to your camera, and yourself!
• Framing the scene... it's a good thing.
• Dealing with lighting to your advantage.
• Color balance - true or false? it's your call.

Meet at 10:00 am by the Information Kiosk in the East entrance of Pasadena City Hall.

Workshop 2, February 18: The Basics of Composition with Ibarionex Perello, author of the bestselling book, Chasing the Light: Improving Your Photography with Available Light

      An adjunct professor at Art Center College of Design, Perello has designed this workshop to teach students to improve their photographic compositions. You will learn how to carefully consider what to include and exclude from the frame as well as how visual qualities such as brightness, contrast, sharpness, patterns, and color saturation shape how we create and see photographs. This workshop will take place beginning at !0:00 am in Curtin House at Pasadena Museum of History.

Workshop 3, February 25: Phoneshots with Eliot Crowley, Santa Barbara-based commercial photographer

    What is the best camera to use?  There is one camera most of us already have and rarely consider… our cellular telephones; most have a camera built in. Somehow we think if it is just a phone camera it can’t be that good. Eliot Crowley will prove otherwise.  The best camera is the one you have with you. As Eliot says, “It’s not the camera, it is the photographer.” In just a couple of hours you will learn some of the capabilities of your phone camera. Be ready at a moment’s notice to make the image, set up the composition and lighting to flatter your subject the most just by pulling your phone out of your pocket.  Equipment needed:  Cellular phone with camera. This workshop will take place on the Colorado Street Bridge .  Participants should park on Grand Avenue and meet at 3:00 pm at the East entrance to the Bridge.

Image: Phoneshot, courtesy Eliot Crowley

Babies in museums? Toddlers at the hardware store?  Nursery school outings to the horse race track?  Yes! These are just a few of the exciting places very young children can explore in Southern California.  But don’t forget the merry-go-rounds, the train rides and the beach!  Author JoBea Holt encourages parents to take their babies and toddlers to the usual and the unusual places - all of which will bring smiles to the children's faces and relief from the everyday routines.  A variety of outings will be presented including a detailed look at a trip to the tide pools.  Books will be available for purchase.  Doors open at 6:30 pm for viewing the exhibition galleries and a wine and cheese reception.

A native of Pasadena, Architect Doug Ewing has been inspired by the richness of the architectural history and styles in this city, including great examples of Mission, Italian Renaissance, Spanish Eclectic, Prairie, Bungalow, Craftsman, International, and the Case Study houses of the 1950s and 1960s.  All of these references have influenced his perspective on design and led him to create his own vision, which he refers to as Pasadena Progressive, expressing a simpler, more contemporary, and therefore less costly version of architecture.  This program will focus on about forty examples of his work that express the Pasadena Progressive style.  A home tour will follow later in the year.   Doors open at 6:30 pm for viewing the exhibition galleries and a wine and cheese reception.

We are honored to present Edward Serotta, founder of Centropa and an expert on Balkan Jewry and the Jews of Sarajevo.  Centropa, a Vienna-based organization, is dedicated to creating an archive of photographs and oral histories of the Jews of the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe.

From Sepharad to Sarajevo: A Journey of Persecution, Survival, and Reconciliation is an event jointly sponsored by the Pasadena Museum of History and the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.  It draws on the themes of Sephardim, the Balkans, and memory, woven through Geraldine Brook’s People of the Book, the 2012 winner of Pasadena’s “One City, One Story.”  Just as the novel weaves the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah through different historical periods of conflict and persecution, from the expulsion of the Jews of Spain through their arrival and survival in Sarajevo, we will explore different periods of Sephardic and Balkan Jewry, the role of cultural memory, and the complex fabric of multiethnic and interfaith relations.  The talk will touch on the discovery and rescue of the Sarajevo Haggadah, both during World War II and during the Bosnian War, and the story of La Benevolencija, the nonsectarian aid agency where Jews and Muslims, Serbian Orthodox and Catholic Croats, all worked side by side to help save their embattled city.

Edward Serotta is author of Survival in Sarajevo: Jews, Bosnia and Lessons of the Past, which can be found secondhand at abebooks.com  He is also the producer of a special twenty minute ABC News Nightline report on the Sarajevo Haggadah, Searching For Hope, which can be ordered in DVD format from Amazon.  Rebecca Golbert, a visiting professor of Jewish Studies at Pepperdine University and Associate Director of the Glazer Institute for Jewish Studies, will moderate the event.

Looking for a perfect evening full of culture, music, food & fun?  PMH along, with fourteen other cultural organizations in Pasadena , opens our doors to celebrate ArtNight.  At the Museum explore art inspired by local people, places and things as Contemporary Masters, Artistic Eden III makes its public debut.

Also back by popular demand...the dangerously good food of the Komodo Food Truck.  Free parking at Avery Dennison just east of the Museum.  For more information on ArtNight visit: www.artnightpasadena.org

Kevin Jones, curator of the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, commemorates the centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic in an illustrated lecture exploring the four categories of travelers: First Class, Second Class, Steerage, and Crew.  Out of the 2,200 people sailing aboard the 1912 inaugural voyage of Titanic, 1,500 froze, drowned, or were crushed to death when it hit an iceberg and sank. The passengers represented twenty-nine countries worldwide, from the very poor to the very wealthy, and were indicative of a global cross-section of the late Edwardian era.  Doors open at 6:30 pm for viewing the exhibition galleries and a wine and cheese reception.