So lesson 1 was finally here, firstly I set off in plenty of time to reach college and I must say I’m impressed by the new reception building at the front of Handbridge College. However I was about to be impressed further by the receptionist who managed to bring up my details from my previous course at the college…… 11 years ago! So after paying the modest £47.50 for this 7 week beginners course I headed off to the Learning Centre, an area of the college I spent a lot of time all those years ago and after meeting a fellow photographer, Tony, I made my way to the classroom....................
Out tutor came in and introduced himself, Samuel M Chaloner (or Mark for short) handed out a booklet to the 12 of us entitled ‘Photography Improver's Course’ along with 2 huge portfolios of his previous work and it’s fair to say he has some cracking credentials, some of the work inside the portfolios were really impressive and it became apparent (well to me anyway) that Mark is an excellent Portrait photographer.
During the first 5 minutes, while we were waiting for the stragglers to turn up and Mark took this opportunity to have a wonder around to see what equipment we all had brought with us, at this point I was panicking a little as of my fellow students had brought fairly impressive modern cameras along with them. It was at this point that I was hoping that my Bridge Camera would be ok. Luckily (for my own relief) a fellow student pulled out a basic digital camera, now when I say basic I don’t want to sound disrespectful as I know different cameras have different functionalities and I have very little knowledge hence the reason I’m on the course!!
The next thing that happened surprised me even further, Mark informed us we were going out into the ‘field’ to start taking photographs!! I thought this course was to learn all the functions of the camera, I wasn’t expecting to be heading straight out to take snaps! So after being offered a lift with Tony we headed straight up to the County Court Car Park and met up with the rest of the group.
Mark started by telling us what we would be doing on today’s lesson. He described in detail how we would be looking mainly at the Composition of photographs. Not for the first time during the evening I was surprised, how was I going to learn about shutter speed and when to use a flash etc…… During the next 5 minutes, while I was trying to take in all the information, I pondered about what Mark had said, how would I remember this all?? I learnt as the evening lesson went on that everything Mark had told us at the start fitted in perfectly in a well produced lesson. Although it was not what I expected I took away some valuable points from my first lesson which I will blog about separately
- Lead-In’s
- 3 Step & 3 Height Rule
- Deleting Photographs
- Basic Positioning for Portraits
- Basic Positioning for Landscapes
So we head into Week 2 and we have been asked to bring along out Tri-Pods (if we have them) as we are hoping to take some photographs of sunsets among other landscape photos (weather depending of course). Mark also informed us that we will be heading to the College during Week 3 to look at our photographs on the computer; I am already looking forward to it!
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