As the Workshops move closer to their end than their beginning, pressure mounts. It’s time for possibilities to be transformed into production.

Photographs. Video footage. Interviews. Captions. Story text. Book designs. Web pages. Gallery prints.

The tone of many coaching engagements shifts from  encouraging to  demanding. Expectations rise.

Anxiety, too.

Then a breakthrough comes. Student faces story, and sees how to make it sing.

When that’s happening, who needs sleep?

This is what’s hard about the Mountain Workshops: Trust. Really listening to your coaches, even when they’re critical of your images. Especially when they’re critical of your images. No whining. No pouting. And then DOING WHAT THEY SAY. Without equivocation, hesitation, or resistance. Roll over and show the belly. Check your ego at the door. Pick your metaphor: It all comes down to the same thing.

Growth hurts.

To get better, first you have to acknowledge that you are not yet all that you wish to be. That you know less, have less developed skills, than you want to have. You have to try stuff you’re not sure of. What if you make an idiot of yourself? What if you fail?

Basketball legend Michael Jordan famously declared, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

Some participants take the shot. They try. And blow it. And try again. And miss. And try again. And then, maybe on the last day, make one beautifully crafted, intimate, intentional image. An image that speaks truth. Truth that matters.

Do that once, and you can do it again. The gift of Mountain Workshops confidence has launched more than one prize-winning photographic career.

During Wednesday night’s critique, coach William Snyder scolded his team to “Get your damn gear out of the picture!”

But Nina Greipel might be forgiven if her pictures contain a camera or two—or 10. Nina’s main job this week is to take the pictures of the people taking the pictures. And to take the pictures of the people coaching the people taking the pictures. And to take the pictures of the people editing the pictures gleaned from all of the above. She uses a lot of those pictures for her other main responsibility: keeping the Workshops’ Facebook page fresh.

It’s Nina’s sixth year as the Workshops’ documentarian. The 2004 WKU graduate has twice served as a labbie, and also logged one stint as a shooting participant and another as an editing participant.

She admits the first few years as the Workshops’ photographer were intimidating. “I was a little under pressure because I was surrounded by so many talented photographers—way more talented than me,” says the 37-year-old from Louisville. “But in the end, I learned to forget about it and do my job, just have fun with it.”

Over the years, she’s figured out the rhythm of the week—what to shoot when, where to be to catch the pinnacle moments. Come day three, for instance, she’s usually getting up before dawn to accompany a shooting participant trying to catch the special early morning light. By Friday and Saturday, she says, “it’s just cranking.”

This Thursday was typical. After ducking in and out of the Henderson Community College Fine Arts Center all day, she hunted for features during the “golden hour” before the sun sets,  grabbed a quick bite, then made the rounds. Her first stop was the dark cave that is the online lab. She consulted with editor Jonathan Woods about an upcoming blog post, and stepped back to fire a few frames when James Gregg came by to chat.

Her next stop was the multimedia lab. There, she dropped to her knees to get a good angle on participant Russell Scalf, who was sandwiched between coaches Liz Baylen and Lynne Warren, who were helping him figure out the best edit of an interview they were screening in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Finally, Nina circled back to the main stage to document the evening’s program. She straddled a chair to shoot the Nikon rep. And as each presenter took their turn, she shot over their shoulders, in their faces, circling them like prey.

Shooting each year’s Workshops, she says, gives her the journalistic juice she needs to fuel her freelance business. And when she gets back to being a pastry chef at her parents’ German restaurant, she’s excited to share with her own family what she got from “hanging out with my journalism family.”

“It re-inspires me. It gets me back in the game. It keeps my shooting fresh, keeps my skills fresh,” she says. “It brings back  memories from back in the day when I was a student. You’re nervous. You’re tired. You’re exhausted. You also want to learn. You get that amazing lesson that hits you in the middle of the week. You come out of here thinking your life has just changed dramatically—that’s Mountain Workshops.”

Chuck Stinnett, who’s spent more than 30 years at the Henderson Gleaner, was tasked Thursday night with helping the participants figure out how to capture Henderson the town. Earlier in the day, the book editors had expressed concern that the shooters were concentrating too much on their stories and neglecting to capture Henderson’s sense of place.

After giving them the low-down on the number of trains that run through town each day (60) … the age of the oldest neighborhoods (about 200 years) … and the fact that Henderson has damn good barbecue (even though nearby Owensboro makes the “barbecue capitol” claim) … Stinnett pulled a fortune cookie strip out of his wallet.

Before the presentation, Chuck and a buddy had grabbed a bite at Hunan’s Chinese Restaurant, where Chuck commandeered his friend’s fortune cookie.

At the conclusion of his presentation, Chuck read from the fortune as though it were his own: “You see everything that happens in terms of its larger meaning.” He considered that for a moment, then declared: “Yeah, that’s about right.”

“Thanks guys,” he concluded. “I’ve been wonderful.”

Clouds scuttled in last night, as we snatched a few hours of sleep. Coaches and participants kept hashing out story ideas until after 1 a.m., and some stalwart faculty and staff got together in hotel rooms even later to debrief each other, and decompress with a glass of Kentucky’s own aqua vitae.

By dawn the wind was picking up, and so was the pace of the Workshops. Contacts have been made. Road maps creased and marked. Notebooks are filling. Still shooters and multimedia makers are looking hard at Henderson, trying to see clearly into the soul of a community. There’s a sense of story in the air.

This morning, while waiting outside the Sleep Inn for a van ride to the Workshops site, I scrolled idly through the #mws2012 hashtag on Instagram. I came across a photograph of a modest-looking meal on a paper plate, described in two words: complimentary breakfast. A commenter wrote that she had also enjoyed a breakfast with some “friendly truckers” that morning.

I thought to myself, “Huh, that’s nice,” and moved on with my day.

A few hours later in the IT room I was catching up with Jim Bye on our mutual small-town-newspaper experiences. Tim Broekema came in to tell Jim that Steve McCarty, the Arts Center technical director, had assured him that Worshop folks needn’t worry about being out of the building by any particular time. Even though Steve stays on site until the last of us has headed for our hotels. Midnight. One in the morning, two in the morning. Please don’t feel pressure to leave at a certain hour, Steve said to Tim. Stay as long into the night as you need to.

I thought to myself, “Well. That’s awfully generous.”

And then I started thinking more.

We’re strangers here. We’ve come in and promptly pointed cameras in the faces of people all over the town. That’s not the most comfortable encounter. It can even be a little scary for someone who’s  not accustomed to media attention. But the people I’ve heard about have been more than willing to let us document their lives, occupy their spaces, and then some.

Nice? Generous? Understatements, for sure.

Henderson, your hospitality is not lost on us.

Steve Remich was on his way to a meeting of teen moms when he saw a sweet feature photo opportunity: A man stood on a dock jutting into the Ohio river, casting a net. The sun was setting. A riverboat was sauntering by.

A handful of other workshop participants had seen it as well, but Steve was the only one to chat up Randy Abbott and get the proverbial “rest of the story.”

It was a heartbreaker: The man had a daughter, born 12 weeks prematurely, still in the hospital. Fishing, he told Steve, was “about the only thing that’ll calm me down.”

Back at home base, his photo coach, Barry Gutierrez, loved a lot about the picture: The light, the riverboat, the way Randy’s net filled the top left third of the picture, right above — yet not crossing — the geometric lines of the CSX railroad bridge.

But Barry zeroed in on the fact that the sole of Randy’s left shoe was just outside the frame. Steve visibly deflated. Then he explained that he only fired off one shot of that moment because he feared being late to the teen moms’ meeting — or blowing past his 200-shot feature limit.

“He’s the artist, this is his canvas and he’s in control of the edge of the frame — and the edge matters,” Barry said. “We’re taking photography to another level, and in order to do that, those minuscule details count.”

For Steve’s part, he said it was a frustrating reminder of photography legend Henri Cartier-Bresson’s admonition: Millimeters matter.

“Even when everything else is right,” Steve said, “you still have to get the foot in the frame.”

This thing is older than the internet. We’ve done this every October for 37 years.

Our founder, Mike Morse, started back in the 70s by photographing one-room schoolhouses. Teachers and students slept in chicken houses and ate bologna sandwiches. Nowadays we sleep at the Sleep Inn and feast on smoked pork butt prepared especially for us by fabulous volunteer chef and full-time photographer John Dunham. Those Workshoppers from long ago would be turning over in their graves. If they were dead, that is.

Happily, they’re mostly alive, and we hope we will be too, when this is done. Long, caffeine-soaked hours will propel us through the week, if recent experience holds. More than a hundred of us journalists, educators, students—and some of us who are all of the above or none of the above—have invaded lovely Henderson, Kentucky, for the 2012 Mountain Workshops.

In less than a week (about 120 hours; who needs sleep?) we’ll produce a book about the town, chock full of stories. We’ll also create a slew of multimedia presentations documenting the lives of people who call Henderson home. There will be a gallery of framed prints and a permanent website as well. We’re not showing off. It’s just what we do. Crazy? Maybe.

There’s learning to be had here. And it’s not just happening for wide-eyed students, standing nervously among giants of the photojournalism world. The name “Workshop” may suggest one-way learning, masters instructing disciples. But that’s misleading. The Mountain Workshops don’t necessarily involve any mountains (the closest thing to mountains around here are the gentle berms on which the handsome Henderson Community College campus is built), and the learning is happening all around. Even the Pulitzer Prize winners among us—and they are thick on the ground just now—find small bits of insight and major bytes of growth.

We are wildly networked, literally, both wired and wireless. But the Workshops also foster the kind of networking that builds friendships and mentorships that last for decades.

Like a flash mob, we started quiet, small, subtle, but we gain strength as we grow. Unlike a flash mob, there’s not a lot of dancing. Yet.

It’s still early. Anything can happen.