Photography on Location – NEW!
Tutor: Wendy Ann Greenhalgh
Join us for a creative photography class that will get you out on the streets with your camera. Each week you’ll explore a different theme: landscape, portraiture, architecture, still life and documentary. Along the way you’ll learn some of the technical and creative elements of photography on location and between classes helpful assignments will help you put what you’ve learned into practice, ready for sharing images the following week. For this course, you will need either a digital or 35mm camera with manual functions (see below for guidance).
About the tutor
Wendy is a writer, artist and teacher. She has a degree in Fine Art and has exhibited her videos, photographs and installations in the UK and Europe. An experience arts educator, she works at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, where she leads arts activities for adults and children (http://mycreativenature.wordpress.com/workshops/).
Camera guidelines
Ideally, buy an SLR (digital if you want digital, film if you want film). SLRs are best if you want to really explore, or even just experiment with photography. There are non-SLR compact digital cameras nowadays that take very good quality pictures but certain key features are limited and therefore limit the photographers capacity to be more creative. Having said that many ex-students have completed the course with a compact and been very happy to continue using their compact cameras.
Canon and Nikon are the safest bets. Not because they are necessarily better, but because they are the biggest companies and therefore have a much wider range of lenses, accessories and equipment on the market (this is particularly true if you are interested in exploring the second-hand market).
Try some out in a shop. The most important things are whether you like it, and whether the way it works makes sense. I personally find the menu system in Canon cameras to be extremely user friendly. All the digital SLR manufacturers - Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony, Olympus, etc - make cameras that produce very good pictures and, to be honest, all have pretty similar features. Most important is whether you like how it feels in your hand, it's not too heavy or fiddly and if the menu system etc seems to make sense. So go to a shop and ask to play around with a few, and pick the one that 'feels' best (and you can afford!). If you really like the Sony, get the Sony. Photography isn't as much fun if you don't like your camera.