On the weekend of the 1st/2nd July 2006 I took part in a digital photography workshop taught by Antonio Leanza, a professional photographer for more than 2 decades, and teacher for the last 10 years.

Sarah bought me this workshop as a gift. Although I have had my Canon EOS 350D DSLR (Digital Rebel XT, for those North American readers) since christmas, I had yet to learn how to use it to it’s full potential. The workshop is a beginners introduction into digital photography and essentially teaches you how to use a camera properly in manual mode, bypassing any of the automatic program modes provided by the camera.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with regards to the format of the weekend, but was glad to discover that only the first few hours were spent indoors learning the camera, the rest of the weekend was spent on the streets of London learning techniques from a practical perspective. There is certainly no shortage of subjects to photograph in London, so it provides the perfect playground in which to learn to use your camera. Not only did we learn the technical aspects of how to use the camera, but covered a wide range of other aspects from photographing movement to composition of scenes.

I can thoroughly recommend this course for those wishing to learn to get more out of their camera. You don’t need a DSLR to take this course either, so long as your camera has a manual mode then you are all set. If you only have Aperature Priority, Shutter Priority or Program modes (read your manual to find out the modes supported by your camera) this course is not for you unfortuately.

Over the next few months I will run a series of posts that showcase some of the best photographs I managed to take over the course of the weekend. I have 33 of them to show, and each photograph is as-it-came out of the camera with no photoshop manipulation. I will try and post one at least every second day. As I post them on here they will also appear in my gallery, so you can head there at any time to see all of them together.

See my next post for the first photograph.