Critiquing Your Work

with Colleen Miniuk

Out of the thousands of images we make, how do we pick “The One”? What makes a photo a “keeper”? It depends, of course, but on what? In this insightful and comprehensive presentation, outdoor photographer Colleen Miniuk will offer an approach and series of questions to evaluate your images more objectively. By showing examples of successful and less-than-successful photographs, attendees will hear how to analyze composition, lighting, depth of field, focus, and other considerations. By identifying behaviors and techniques we want to repeat—and avoid!—in future outings, shutterbugs who review their photographs polish their photography skills, shape their creative visions, and make images they’re proud of, with consistency.

About Your Speaker

Colleen Miniuk

Colleen Miniuk (she/her), also known to many as “Bubbles,” is a dynamic and passionate outdoor photographer, writer, educator, speaker, and publisher based in Chandler, AZ, on the ancestral homelands of the Hohokam. In 2007, she left behind her corporate career to follow her love for the outdoors and photography. With an adventurous spirit, today her work reveals a deep emotional resonance and creative connection with the land (and water!).

Colleen’s images have graced the pages of publications such as National Geographic, Arizona Highways, AAA Via, On Landscape, National Parks Traveler, and a broad variety of other outlets.

In addition to her photography, Colleen is a prolific writer and author. She has penned several books, including Photographing Acadia National Park: The Essential Guide to When (after serving thrice as Acadia’s Artist-in-Residence), Where, and How; Wild in Arizona: Photographing Arizona’s Wildflowers; and The Current Flows: Water in the Arid West. Her first adventure travel memoir, So Said the River: Life, Loss, and Pie on the Colorado, was published in July 2024. She served as the publisher for Guy Tal’s Another Day Not Wasted and Bruce Taubert’s Wild in Arizona: Photographing Arizona’s Wildlife. She writes an online photography advice column called “Dear Bubbles.”

As a fervent advocate for creative expression, Colleen is just as enthusiastic about teaching as she is about creating. She leads photography workshops (including all-women sessions called Sheography™), teaches classes, and offers one-on-one mentoring. Her workshops invite curiosity, provoke thought, foster personal connection to the natural world, and empower photographers to find their unique voice.

When she’s not photographing, writing, or teaching, she’s camping in her Alaskan Camper, stand-up paddleboarding, rafting, making sand or snow angels, recording dance videos, painting, sipping bubbly (e.g. Prosecco), wandering, wondering, and living her big Life with a capital L. Learn more at http://www.colleenminiuk.com