Henderson: A Week in the Life of a Kentucky County, a 35-print gallery and 16 video narratives centered on the School of Journalism and Broadcasting photojournalism program’s annual Mountain Workshops, will be open until Dec. 18 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday at the Mass Media and Technology Hall gallery. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

In 1976, two WKU faculty members took a dozen photojournalism students into eastern Kentucky and Tennessee to document the 11 remaining one-room schools there. The teachers didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of an annual trek. Thirty-six years later in Henderson, three concurrent workshops were held that fine-tune photography, picture-editing and multimedia skills of college students and mid-career professionals in an intensive weeklong effort that documents a town and its surrounding countryside.

WKU faculty members are joined by volunteer shooting, editing and writing coaches who travel from across the country — from the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, TIME magazine and a host of other venues — to guide trainees and produce content for a photo exhibit, several multimedia productions and a book of 100-plus pages. From their humble beginnings of travel with cameras, black-and-white film and sleeping bags, workshop staff now spend months planning and setting up sophisticated facilities with state-of-the-art computing and digital imaging equipment.

Read more about this year’s workshop at the ABC News blog or Los Angeles Times Frameworks blog.