CONVERTINI

Teaching and leading these photography retreats with my amazing co-teacher Lena Aires are my personal highlights each year. It involves everything I cherish: traveling, meeting new wonderful souls, getting inspired, talking about photography all day long and sharing what I love most. I do love to teach (inputs like fundamentals on film, creative portraiture and self-portraits on film), eat the amazing meals prepared by friends and amazing chefs, creating a LOT and just genuinely having the most beautiful time. Since a long while we felt the the need to find a name that does these amazing days enough justice. For years we’ve juggled around between photography ‚workshop’ and ‚retreat’. but neither did really encapsulate how much unspeakable beauty we experience there. It’s just so much more than a workshop. We finally decided give this thing that we’ve been doing for years a name and are so happy to introduce „closer hearts“ as our brand name! It’s pointed at the fact that we all meet as strangers and without exception after those magical days we have grown closer together, sharing at heart a passion for creating and photography. Our adventures are not so much about perfect results or perfect techniques, or results as such in particular: it's about getting inspired, being motivated, connect and shoot with other creatives and ultimately sharing a safe space together where it all can flow and naturally unfold. Hidden from the world in a beautiful space (previously an old style Portuguese Villa in Porto, an old mansion with gigantic garden in the Normandy, up on a hill watching over Rome until the seaside, in an incredibly fun and colorful traditional Spanish home in Malaga and a beautiful seaside villa in Greece, a traditional Swedish Cottage, a authentic Tuscan Farmhouse and a flamboyant french princess castle) we created relentlessly, spending time doing the things we love most. At our creative getaways we are always trying to find the perfect balance between teachings, inputs, exercises, but also free time to venture out and create by yourself. Also we really enjoy having our meals together, adding more time and space to have beautiful conversations and even some dancing and singing - which seems to alway happen at one or the other evening. All photos are impressions of the past retreats.