Yes, The Beginner's Workshop is a prerequisite. Please take the Beginners' Workshop in San Francisco; the Palo Alto location no longer offers the Beginners' Workshop. 

Each location, San Francisco or Palo Alto, has different gifts to offer.

The Palo Alto location does not have all the elements that we need to teach the concepts in the Intermediate I & II Workshops. For instance, Palo Alto does not have a big waterfall that allows us to show attendees how to use ND filters for long exposure photography. 

Further, we will probably end up going to the same location for Intermediate I & II Workshops and just for demonstrating a different photography concept. And we don't think this is fun.

Therefore, we've created The Speciality Classes in Palo Alto to fully utlitize what the location offers: Animal, Flower, Portrait Photography and more.

The concepts that we teach in The Speciality Classes are mostly from the Intermediate I Curriculum in San Francisco. 

Attendees are welcome to bring their own equipment, because it is also our goal to help them use their own equipment (if there's any) eventually.

We need everyone to start with the equipment that we provide, so the whole class can move at the same pace. At the same time, it is also easier to understand the basics with our equipment, and the settings are effortlessly transferable to other cameras once they grasp the concepts. Attendees can use their own equipment in the 2nd half of the workshop with the help of the instructor, and they will be amazed at how fast they pick up the settings.

We designed the curriclum using the gift of each location to maximize the attendees' learning experiences.

Teaching some themes is not possible in Palo Alto; for instance, we need a big waterfall to teach long exposure photography using ND filters, but there's no such thing in Palo Alto. Therefore, we have to offer the Intermediate Workshops in San Francisco location in order to teach attendees what we've promised in the curriculum.

Nevertheless, Palo Alto has a lot of locations that will allow us to teach the themes that cannot be taught in San Francisco. Please check out the Speciality Classes in Palo Alto.

Attendees will model for each other, through which they will also learn the posing tricks.

A model is not available for The Speciality Class. 

A model is only available for the in-depth level portrait workshops.

No, the Themes are independent of one another. You do not need to sign up for Theme A before Theme B.

We design the curriculum so that each location is fully utilized to maximize your learning experience.

Some locations do not provide the elements for a particiular type of photography.

If genres that you want to learn are taught in different Themes, please sign up for both Themes.