Our Instructors

James Lam

James Lam is a fully licensed photographer based in Alberta.  He fell into photography career completely by accident.  He originally began his career as a mechanical engineer, and continued to climb the corporate ladder eventually completing his MBA and Masters of Engineering before becoming the director of marketing at a national charity in Australia. 

One day on holiday when James was particularly perturbed about work, his best friend was kind enough to start teaching James about SLR photography.  From these humble beginnings, James continued to develop his photography skills till a point where he was passionate and knowledgeable enough to teach others the skills of the trade.

James continues to develop his own techniques and experiments with different facets of photography. His personal Flickr blog is a work in progress and some of his best work can be found at www.flickr.com/banalama.

Mackenzie Walker

Mackenzie is a born and bred Calgarian with a passion and eye for photography. Hailing from a long line of professional photographers, ‘Mack” first picked up a camera at the age of 3… we’re still waiting for him to put it down.  

Mackenzie has comprehensive photographic experience through professional photo shoots at Weddings, Graduations, Theatrical Productions, Fundraising Events, Architectural shoots, Headshots, Portraits, Commercial, and Family Photos just to name a few. Mackenzie continues to develop his own unique style (which we love!).

Along with photography, Mackenzie enjoys travel, design, good coffee and values time with friends and family. 

Always looking forward to his next assignment, Mackenzie is completely enamored with the photographic arts, and continues to move forward trying to always improve and learn from the people around him. 

What we particularly like about Mack is his uncontainable and infectious enthusiasm on the job! Always patient, Mack looks forward to every class and teaching budding photographers.   Some of his recent work can be found on his website: www.mackenziewalker.ca. 

Kelly Mitchell

Kelly Mitchell fell in love with photography at the tender age of just 8. She has a love for photography and create beautiful images to share her perceptive of the world.  For Kelly, photography first started as a form of relaxation and a creative outlet. To gain insight into the art , Kelly started to take courses at the local college. Learning is a big part of photography and to this day she continues to look for new courses to take to improve her photography skills.  As our newest photography class instructor in Calgary, Kelly says: “Learn Photography Canada has given me a great opportunity to share my knowledge with others and to open their minds to see the world in a much different light.”.  You can follow Kelly's adventures here.

Cristiona Ni HIci

Cris hails from rural Ireland.  Due to the lack of modern entertainment she began exploring her surroundings - camera and notebook in hand. Enjoying such endeavours and being ruled by the right side of the brain, art was a clear career path. However, Artist is not a popular career choice with Irish parents and upon completion of an Interior Archecture degree she began a "secure" job in a design firm in Toronto. Like James, the stars aligned to pursue photography and here she finds herself today. Her motto is "If there is light there is a photograph" all you need to do is engage your senses and click. Being dominated by the right side of the brain, Cris found the technical jargon of photography confusing "Aperture?!", "F-stop?!" ek! Bearing this in mind, her teaching methods are more visual and less technical, but effective nonetheless!  If you felt yourself getting lost in the technical side fear not, help is but a click away.  You can see some of Cris' work here.

Barbara Rahal

Barb is originally from Santiago, Chile, where she started her career as an artistic nude and portrait photographer. She added commercial and sports photography to her resume in the 90's when by accident she became an ATP tennis and hockey photographer in Munich, Germany. Barb spent a brief period as a paparazzi photographer whilst also acting as a second photographer for the Munich Barons, who were the DEL Hockey 2000 Cup champions (think Europe's equivalent of the Stanley Cup!).

The travel bug has taken her around the world several times for both personal adventures and work. In 2001 she decided to take a position with a cruise line, which allowed her to continue to nurture her loves - travel, photography, and teaching! Barb's Academy at Sea class taught travelers basic photography theory and both basic and advanced techniques to help them improve the quality of their images with their own cameras.

During her cruising years, she not only felt in love with her Canadian man that brought her all the way to the north, but she also discovered her passion for wedding photography.

You can see her recent work at barbararahalphotography.ca or her on Facebook page.

Michael Desjardins

It seems to me I've had a camera in my hand since my early teens. I started with film and moved to digital and over the years I've had a passion for photography. I started taking pictures of family, friends, sports, landscapes, you name it. It all excited me. After selling cameras for a few years I started as a freelance photographer in 1992 and within a short time had clients in the sports and television world. Over the years my photography has been on covers and in magazines across North America, with clients including Canadian Geographic, Global TV, The Bank of Montreal and The Sporting News. But the underlying driving force has been my love of photography. Digital photography has many things going for it including the instant image on the back of the camera. But photography has one thing that's most important to me, it's fun!

You can see Michael's recent work at www.actionimagephoto.com.