Kissing automatic goodbye

Last night I attended the first session of a photography course I signed up for on Tuesday. It’s an 8-week course run by the folks at Belfast Exposed and I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. I bought my DSLR last summer but to be honest I haven’t gotten familiar with it at all. I tried to read various magazines and books on photography but to be honest I just ended up more bewildered. In fact last weekend I was trying to figure out some stuff when I got to the point that I thought I would never get the hang of this exposure/shutter speed/aperture/white balance/ISO etc etc malarkey! So I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I walked in the door of the classroom/studio last night. There are 4 others in the class – nice small number – and the tutor is dead friendly and approachable – “no question is a silly question”. I think my mouth dropped open when he announced that we’d be heading out to take photos shortly and that we’d be shooting in manual mode…I’ve never had the guts to go anywhere near the M on my camera dial! But after some basic instruction (which made so much more sense coming from a real live human being rather than a manual/book) and some useful pointers on getting exposure right, we set out for a dander round the cathedral quarter. With the sun dropping in the sky and casting great light on the buildings we were all in our element snapping away. I have to say it was truly liberating and I had a ball. After about an hour or so we headed back to load the photos onto the studio’s Macs. I was trying to play around with the exposure settings so I’m going to spend a bit more time looking at my photos when I get the time to try and get a feel for what works and what doesn’t, maybe once I’ve done that I’ll post a few of my photos (or maybe I’ll even set up a Flickr, we’ll see!). I took about 90-odd shots and there were only a few I was pleased with but to be honest I’m not worried, it was just great to be given an idea of how to go about things and it will give me a bit more confidence to play around with my camera a bit more. I was a bit freaked out when the tutor said that photography is all about numbers - the last time I was good with numbers was when I was 14 and had a maths teacher who was scary enough to ensure that you always had the correct answer ready for when she pounced on you. But I’m really looking forward to the next 7 weeks of the course, it’s money well spent already!