Last Christmas I was given a voucher for a course in photography (Photography Level 1 with Jessops). Despite making the course booking just a few days after Christmas, the first available date was Saturday 25 March. This date rolled around fairly speedily in the end, and I nervously went along with D’s “big” camera. I was fully prepared to spend a day not understanding anything whatsoever, and basically coming out a big fat failure at the end. However, the course was absolutely amazing and I would highly recommend it to anyone and everyone looking for a really basic course in beginners photography.

The main topics covered on this course were the components of exposure (aperture priority, shutter speed and ISO), but we also considered some basic composition techniques. The day was divided fairly evenly between classroom work (Powerpoint slides and camera handling practice), and extended practice in the park. The leader, a professional photographer himself, seemed to have extensive knowledge of every single camera in the room, and was able to answer every single question I had (and if anyone knows me, they know I can ask a lot of questions, more than my 4 year old at times).

I feel like I am reviewing the course, but this post was not intended to be that at all; I just wanted to state how amazing it was!

Since attending this course, I was introduced to an additional course, A Year With My Camera, written by Emma Davies. This is a free online course and has, to date, been the perfect complement to the Jessops course. Emma emails out a short lesson each week (every Thursday), based on a specific topic, and includes a piece of homework at the end to enable the lesson to be put into practice. Although the lessons are emailed weekly, there is no obligation to complete it at the time of the email, or even at all. The aim of this course is to spend a year with your camera (as it states), learning to be “the best photographer you know”. I think that is a really lovely way of putting it and is, at the end of the day, my main aim!

Although I only started Emma’s course a couple of weeks ago, as the first few modules covered very similar topics to the Jessops course (exposure and composition), I was able to catch up quite quickly. We are now well into the light modules, and I am enjoying them very much!

Anyway, all in all, I have been a photography “student” for exactly 1 month now, and have spent my time playing around with the workings of the camera. I have to admit that I bought a new lens after the Jessops course (I could easily have bought so much more but refrained, for now), and so almost every picture has been taken with my Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM lens; I realise that this is probably not the best lens for every photo but as my main focus is portrait photography, I haven’t bothered faffing with lenses too much!

I have played around with focus, backgrounds, foregrounds and subject, aperture priority, composition techniques, photograph angles, shutter speed and light.

Anyway, without further ado, here is our April in (vast numbers of) pictures:

Playing with fast shutter speeds:

Playing with aperture priority, photograph angles and composition techniques:

Experimenting with different light:

Experimenting with composition techniques, focus, subject, background and foreground:

Composition techniques, subject focus, negative space:

And some that probably break all of the “rules”, but are fun anyway:

I hope you all had a lovely Easter!