Creative Smartphone Imagery with Maryellen Stone

Following the incredible response to her recent workshops, the brilliant Maryellen Stone is returning to Camversation for a special five-part series dedicated entirely to unlocking the artistic potential of mobile photography.

We always have our phones in our pockets, but are we truly using them to create fine art? This series is bound to be incredibly popular, so we are launching this registration page early to give our community the opportunity to lock in their places before spaces fill up.

More information on this series will follow.

The Full Series

Please note that these sessions will run fortnightly on Mondays. If you cannot make a session live, your ticket includes full replay access to every single part for three months.

• Session 1: Monday 9 November 2026

• Session 2: Monday 23 November 2026

• Session 3: Monday 7 December 2026 

• Session 4: Monday 21 December 2026 

• Session 5: Monday 4 January 2027

What This Series Will Explore

Over these five interconnected sessions, Maryellen will guide you step by step through a complete fine-art mobile workflow. While the full, detailed outline will be emailed to all participants ahead of time, here is the core of what this series will cover:

• Capturing Intentional Images: Learn how to move past quick snapshots and consciously compose expressive, artistic photographs using your phone camera.

• Exploring Creative Apps: Discover Maryellen’s favourite mobile photography apps and learn how to navigate them to expand your creative toolkit.

• Advanced Mobile Editing: Dive into fine-art editing workflows directly on your device, learning how to manipulate light, tone, and texture.

• Creating Painterly Styles: Find out how to transform ordinary everyday scenes into unique, painterly images with a distinct fine-art feel.

About Maryellen Stone

Maryellen is a photographer, digital artist, and a very well-loved part of our Camversation family. Deeply inspired by the outdoors, she loves combining her passion for animals and nature with her photography, always looking for unique light, colour, and movement.

Known for her incredibly patient and warm teaching style, Maryellen is fantastic at breaking down editing techniques so they are genuinely easy to follow. She focuses on classic, practical skills that give you full creative control over your final images. While her work has earned numerous awards in exhibitions both at home and abroad, Maryellen’s ultimate goal is simple: to elevate the ordinary and make the world a little more beautiful.

Series Booking Information

• Five Live Interactive Sessions: Join Maryellen and fellow photographers from around the world live online.

• Replays: If you cannot make a session live, every ticket includes the recordings, streamed on our website in high definition. How long you keep them depends on which ticket you choose: one month after the final session, or twelve months.

• Perfect for All Skill Levels: Whether you are completely new to mobile editing or looking to add a new creative dimension to your existing photography, Maryellen’s friendly, supportive guidance is the perfect place to start.

Maryellen's previous presentations on Camversation:

Making Your Own Textures:

www.camversation.co.uk

Buying this will allow you to ACCESS Maryellen's recording for four weeks, as usual. This DOES NOT allow download. Watch highlights: https://youtu.be/QNtPG0wL6HY Do not just rely on stock filters. Learn to create your own unique art. Join Maryellen Stone for this creative demonstration on finding, shooting, and blending your own textures to transform simple photographs into painterly masterpieces. What You Will LearnIn this 90-minute session, Maryellen walks through her personal creative process and demonstrates the key techniques she uses to create her signature look: The Scavenger Hunt: Maryellen shares her favourite spots for finding textures in everyday life, from rusting baking trays and peeling paint to concrete floors and fabric. Shooting Tips: Practical advice on how to photograph your textures, including shooting straight-on and managing glare to ensure they work well as overlays. Prep & Polish: A walkthrough of how she processes raw texture files, using tools like Desaturate and Levels to create high-contrast assets ready for blending. Layer Modes: A demonstration of using blending modes like Soft Light, Overlay, and Multiply to mix textures with your original image. Creative Experiments: How she uses the Invert command to swap blacks and whites, instantly changing the mood of a texture. Using Masks: How to use Layer Masks and brushes to gently remove texture from specific areas (like a subject's face) to refine the final image. Who Is This For? Photographers who want to see a professional workflow for adding textures. Creatives feeling stuck who want a fun, low-pressure way to experiment. Anyone tired of buying expensive texture packs who wants to make their own for free. What People Said:This session was originally recorded live with an audience of over 150 photographers from around the world (including the UK, USA, Australia, South Africa, and Finland). Thank you Maryellen, you have really inspired me to have a go! Hilary Really interesting seeing how you build up the layers. Ann My mind is blown with the possibilities. Denise Fantastic demo, thank you! David

Taking Textures Further:

www.camversation.co.uk

Taking Textures Further with Maryellen Stone Did you miss our highly anticipated live broadcast? Don’t worry, you can rent the full recording right now and enjoy unlimited viewing access for a full four weeks! When this session went live, the energy in our virtual room was unmatched. Photographers logged in from all corners of the globe, including the UK, USA, Canada, Sweden, and South Africa, to watch the brilliant Maryellen Stone share her fine-art texturing secrets. This recording is your chance to pull up a front-row seat and discover how to completely transform your images into deeply expressive, painterly works of art using foundational post-processing techniques. 🌟 What the Community is Saying (Direct Feedback from the Live Chat): 💬 The interesting thing is that all these techniques have been available within Ps for years! No AI stuff!! Marilyn T.💬 Fabulous presentation. I love your style of teaching and found your explanations easy to follow. Thank You! Caroline💬 Absolutely wonderful... going to go out and photograph some more textures. Ellen R.💬 The bokeh on the vase photo is FABULOUS as well as the colour gradient! Danelle J.💬 Beautiful Maryellen. All different and all beautiful! Sharon G.💬 Every day is a school day. Celia H.💬 That was great, can’t wait for the next thanks! Jerry 💻 Core Techniques & Concepts Covered:In this comprehensive, step-by-step workshop, Maryellen breaks down her exact creative process. You will learn: The Foundations of Texturing: Why you simply cannot talk about textures without mastering layers, masks, opacities, and blend modes. The Magic of Blend Modes: How to navigate and experiment with different blend modes, including Multiply, Overlay, and more, to find beautiful, unexpected creative surprises. The Power of Opacity Control: How to lower and manipulate your layer opacity so you can cleanly view your underlying subject, build up effects gradually, and mask away details precisely. Flipping and Reusing Textures: Creative ways to alter, flip, or reapply the exact same texture file to achieve entirely different visual results. Real-World Project Walkthroughs: Watch Maryellen apply these tools live on various subjects, including a vase photo, a lion image, a garden dahlia, and even transforming a raw waterfall photo into a stunning texture overlay. Pure, Classic Editing Skills: How to achieve stunning fine-art results without relying on automated AI tools, using classic, powerful manual methods that give you 100% artistic control. 🛠️ Using Photoshop Elements or Affinity Photo?While Maryellen explicitly demonstrates these methods inside Photoshop during this workshop, photographers using Photoshop Elements or Affinity Photo can easily follow along and achieve the exact same results. The core texturing tools are universally available across these platforms: Photoshop Elements users: You can fully replicate Maryellen's workflow using your main Layers panel, standard blend modes (such as Multiply and Overlay), and standard layer masks to cleanly brush textures off your main subjects. Affinity Photo users: The adjustment process is just as seamless. You can control your texture mapping directly using your regular layers, built-in masking brushes, and standard blend mode options without needing any complicated file conversions. 🎟️ What's Included inside Your Rental: Four Weeks of Full Access: Stream the complete 4K session as many times as you like over a four-week period whenever it fits your schedule. Step-by-Step Software Guidance: Clear, foundational explanations that translate perfectly across your preferred editing software. The In-Room Learning Context: See the exact questions and lightbulb moments shared by your fellow community members during the broadcast.

The guides.

Each of the four teaching evenings comes with a written step-by-step guide, sent after that session and yours to keep. Apps change and settings are easy to forget, so the guide is what you work from when you pick your phone up a fortnight later. The fifth evening is our celebration and sharing night, so there are four guides rather than five.

Choose one option only. Each higher tier includes the one below it.

Series (1 month access), £30.00

All five live sessions, plus the recordings to watch again for one month after the final session. Recordings are streamed on our website and are not downloadable.

Series (1 month) + Guides, £54.00

Everything in the first ticket, plus Maryellen’s four written guides, one for each of the first four teaching sessions. Each guide arrives after its session and is yours to keep, with no expiry. Bought separately afterwards they are £8 each, so ordering them with the series makes one of them free.

Series (12 months) + Guides, £64.00

Everything in the second ticket, and the recordings stay available for twelve months instead of one. This is a series people work through slowly, so a year means part one is still there once you have actually started making things.