Peter Thoeny

 

peter-reflection_hdr1smo2bPeter Thoeny loves to travel and is fascinated with photography since high school in Switzerland. He first used a simple camera on his trips abroad, then for many years shot manually with a Rollei 35. Film was expensive in those days, and when traveling on a shoestring he had to carefully use and compose the shots. He learned to compose images when he did charcoal drawings and paintings while visiting Italy and other places in Europe. Peter now lives south of San Francisco in the Silicon Valley for 18 years.

Peter loves to travel with a small camera bag. He mostly uses a Sony NEX-6 mirror-less camera with a 50mm f1.8 prime lens, a 16-50mm zoom lens, and a 55-210mm telephoto zoom lens. He usually takes bracketed exposures and processes RAW images to get most out of a camera.

“Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” ~ Ansel Adams

Inspired by this quote, Peter strives to compose photos that tell a story and evoke emotions. His motto is 20% gear, 40% composition, 40% post-processing. Peter specializes in quality HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, which is his passion for the last 3 years. He uses HDR processing mainly to work around the technical limitations of cameras by carefully post-processing images with the goal to reconstruct the feeling and the emotions he had while taking the exposures. His images don’t have this typical “HDR look” — most of the time you can’t even tell they are HDR processed. The main purpose of the processing is to be able to look at an image on screen or print, and see what the human eyes actually saw out in the field — the best cameras, screens and prints are still no match to the quality of human eyes.

Peter sells HDR prints on his website at http://qualityhdr.com/ and posts HDR photos on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterthoeny/ on a daily basis.

Peter’s other passion is to deploy collaborative technologies at the workplace, with the goal to make work more effective and transparent. He is the founder and CTO of TWiki.org, inventor of structured wikis, and co-author of the Wikis for Dummies book. Leading the open source TWiki project for many years, he learned to teach and learn in a collaborative way. He loves to teach photography in the same way.

Call Digital Photo Academy at 1 877 372 2231. Lots of people seem to hang up if our welcome recording comes on instead of a live voice, but we promise to return your message within a day or two if you leave one with your name and number.  It would be even better if you included your e mail address as well as the date and city of the class you are considering.  If leaving a voice mail message is not your thing, please email us at [email protected] or [email protected].

 

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    10 Comments

  1. mike Dirickson
    October 19, 2015

    Very helpful instructor. Gave us great insight on composition as well as some basic technical skills I needed as well.

  2. Janet Sim
    October 20, 2015

    “Thanks for the great lesson and coaching! Thanks also for the links.
    I am now inspired to learn more and hopefully will shoot more as well!”

    -Janet

  3. Nargis Rabimova
    September 8, 2016

    “Thank you all for being so flexible and arranging this 1:1 class. It was a lot of information and I’m looking forward to playing with the settings and learning more. Thanks again.

    Thank you,”

    -Nargis

  4. Cheryl Strong
    February 7, 2017

    “Thank you for the workshop! I enjoyed exploring your suggestion at getting down lower when taking photos, and taking the same photo from different heights and vantage points. I love shadows and reflections, so it was a fun day for me and now I’m inspired to practice some pointers that you taught in the workshop. I also enjoyed the fact that the group was small, so it felt like we were able to get more one on one coaching.

    Best,”
    ~Cheryl

  5. ancrystal
    July 5, 2018

    I recently went on a composition tour of Chinatown with Peter, and I was absolutely blown away. I had so much fun and could not believe how much I learned in the span of three hours. I was not only inspired by my awesome instructor, Peter, but also by the group of people that I was with who all had the same passion to become better.

    Thank you again!

    Crystal An

  6. Karen
    July 9, 2018

    “The instructor was knowledgeable and shared many easy-to-understand tips and suggestions. The location (Chinatown) couldn’t have been more perfect: it was alive with culture and movement.”

    -Karen

  7. Crystal A
    August 6, 2018

    “I recently went on a composition tour of Chinatown with Peter, and I was absolutely blown away. I had so much fun and could not believe how much I learned in the span of three hours. I just wanted to say thank you so much for creating such a well thought out and incredibly fun program. I was not only inspired by my awesome instructor, Peter, but also by the group of people that I was with that all had the same passion to become better.”

    -Crystal A.

  8. Anisha Raghavan
    September 30, 2019

    Hi Richard – Peter was great! I really enjoyed it. Thanks for the class.

  9. Anwar
    August 22, 2020

    Jerry and Peter.
    Wonderful. Love it. Thanks for sharing pictures. You both were awesome. Enjoyed every minute of it.
    Take care.
    Anwar.

  10. ECKHART BEATTY
    August 22, 2020

    Thanks again for a great experience

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