Venture: Embracing the Ethereal workshop
Embrace mood and feeling to create dreamy, painterly photographs using filter diffusion!
Date: Saturday 21 February 2026
Duration: 10.00am – 11.30am
Price: $85
Instructor: Seng Mah
Maximum participants: 12
Location: Esplanade Park, Marine Terrace, Fremantle (next to the Fremantle Tourist Wheel)
Pre-requisite: You will need either an old or very cheap UV filter, Circular Polarising Filter or Cling Film (eg. Glad Wrap) on your lens for this workshop. The filter needs to be old (or cheap) as you will be applying Vaseline to the front of the filter.
Embracing the Ethereal is a workshop for photographers who want to flex their creative, artistic imagination and to look into creating images that lean into mood, atmosphere and ambiguity instead of pin-point sharpness. As Henri Cartier-Bresson famously put it, “sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”
The workshop centres on the creative use of Vaseline applied to UV, CPL filters or cling film — a hands-on, slightly messy technique that introduces glow, softness, streaks and painterly diffusion straight out of camera. It’s not about effects for the sake of it; it’s about using diffusion as a creative tool to shape how a scene feels.
You’ll learn how to spot scenes where this aesthetic really works — backlit subjects, strong light, specular highlights, contrast, shadows and scenes and settings that you’d normally walk straight past. One of the surprises of working this way is that it pushes you to photograph things you wouldn’t usually bother with — and suddenly they come alive!
The workshop will also focus on seeing differently. When you’re no longer preoccupied with sharpness. composition, tone, colour, movement, and mood take centre stage. You’ll be guided to look, respond intuitively, and allow ambiguity to become a creative strength rather than a flaw.
If you’re keen to move past clinical perfection and explore photography as a way of capturing a vibe, an idea, or a feeling, then this workshop is for you.
RESERVE YOUR SPOT
Bookings for this event is managed through Humanitix. To book your place in this workshop, click the link below.
https://events.humanitix.com/embracing-the-ethereal-workshop
