Alumni Creative Camp

Beginner and Intermediate/ Advanced Photo Workshops
Stanford Sierra Camp provides an inspiring setting for these digital photography workshops. Novice photographers will learn creative techniques for getting more out of their cameras with outdoor photographer Forrest Glick. Those with more experience will benefit from working with professional photographer, Joel Simon, who spends approximately five months each year abroad on assignments representing over 100 countries and destinations.

Whether a point-and-shoot camera, or experienced photographer with a DSLR, these workshops will get your creative juices flowing. Both groups will begin in the classroom, but quickly move to the outdoors to explore the principals of composition, lighting, and perspective. Benefitting from the near-instant feedback of digital equipment, we will "slow down" to become more comfortable with the settings on our cameras and develop techniques for discovering inspiration along the shores of Fallen Leaf Lake.

Presented by
Joel Simon & Forrest Glick

Design Thinking Tools to Tap Your Creativity
Participants will tackle a design challenge in small teams, learning the prototyping approach designers use to solve problems. We will explore how this essential aspect of the design process can act as a catalyst for creativity and innovation in many different contexts, from personal to work-related. In subsequent sessions we will focus on additional mindsets and skills of the design thinking process, such as empathy and ideation.

Design thinking focuses on asking the right questions, challenging assumptions, generating a range of possibilities, and learning through targeted stages of iterative prototyping. It engenders a sense of creative confidence that is both resilient and highly optimistic. David Kelley, cofounder of design consultancy IDEO and Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, says, "My contribution is to teach as many people as I can to use both sides of their brain, so that for every problem, every decision in their lives, they consider creative as well as analytical solutions."

Presented by Bernie Roth

Food as Memoir: How to Create Delicious Stories From Your Life
Learn to use food-related stories and recipes to record your family's history. Tori will teach creative nonfiction techniques to assemble essays and recipes to build the rich tapestry of the generations of your family. Tori's workshop material will complement the e-book workshop.

Presented by Tori Ritchie

The Three-Hour E-Book
Bring your laptop for this interactive session and leave with an e-book full of your artwork, photos, journal entries and everything you learned at camp and want to apply to your life. You will learn to convert text and image files into an e-book to create a cool scrapbook for your tablet device/e-reader to remind you of the fun experience and what you learned at the touch of a button. Then you'll be ready to create the next great American novel or the next Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Fifty Shades of Gray or...

Presented by Jennifer Test Hartvickson and Hans Hartvickson

Improv Studio
The Improv Studio provides tools that will free you from blocks and open the endless well of ideas inside you. Improv is a pure form of creativity and collaborative storytelling that is fun and playful. Applied improv uses the improv theater art form as a set of learning tools that requires no previous training or acting. Quick wit, cleverness, and being funny are not required or encouraged. In a low-risk, high-impact environment, we will apply these techniques as a means to develop communication, collaboration and creativity skills.

Presented by Rich Cox

Body UP/Liquid Flow!
Combining Dance Improvisation, yoga and Tai Chi to spring into full creative expression each morning, participants will experience the joy of fluid, juicy movement and playful dancing, with freedom and ease.

Presented by
Aleta Hayes