What to expect on a Photography course
We had various students who joined painting classes in 2009, but whose real interest was working with their digital cameras to produce beautiful and striking photographic images. At the end of the Autumn season we therefore decided to run a specific photography course and I was delighted to see the wide range of work produced.
We drove around the countryside, stopping, sometimes only for a few minutes to grab a shot, and then we were on our way again. There is a great flexibility in this method, which is harder to achieve if you need to set up easels and do preparatory drawings for paintings etc.
After three years here I know a lot about this area, but am obviously still learning, so it is exciting to work alongside students, seeing what excites them and swapping ideas and technical know-how to achieve great results.
This is only meant as a guide and your course is dependent on the nature of the group and, of course, the weather. The rest is up to you and each course is very different from the last.
Students arrive on Saturday afternoons, normally by train connections from various airports to our local railway station, in the Tuscan town of Chiusi.
I will help you organise train times and connections and will pick you up from Chiusi station and bring you to the house. We will meet up later on early in the evening for a drink together and then dinner.
The house
We begin work on Sunday after breakfast. I like to start with a series of photographic exercises, partly to get everyone warmed up, and also to begin to see what emerges from the group.
We start simple.
During the day, the work incorporates more and more elements as we build towards our first images later on in the afternoon, interrupted only to enjoy lunch and dinner together.
During the week we will take morning trips to various locations around this area, incorporating as many aspects of the country as we can in the time available.
This will be a time to look at various themes in photography, such as; colour/black and white, line, tone, lighting, composition and cropping, space, movement etc.
Afternoons will be focused on taking the images further, using the Adobe Photoshop programme with careful and subtle manipulation of these images often making all the difference.
This is perhaps the most fluid of all the courses we offer and I would find it difficult to predict what we will end up doing, however;
One day we will go to the local market for a wander round and a chance to experience a typical Italian market atmosphere.
This is a great opportunity to really focus on what catches your eye for your photographs.
It could be the people, the place, the details, or just the differences between what you are used to seeing and what you see in front of you.
Another day will be a city trip; this could be Florence, Rome, Siena, Perugia, Arezzo, Cortona etc.
One day we will focus on landscape at various spots in Tuscany and Umbria, including classic Tuscan shots of the cypress trees within the crete senesi, and more particular and unusual aspects of life in the Italian countryside.
Students are free to dip in and out during the day. If you would like to go for a swim (in season) or for a walk or a run, or just to get away for a while. The courses are for you to enjoy as you wish.
There will be two Apple Macs available here for photographic manipulation however, if you have a laptop and the Photoshop programme, that would be a very useful addition to the studio and would allow you to work at your own speed and in your own time.
If you cannot bring a laptop, you will need to bring a Memory stick or an external hard drive to store your images for you to take back home at the end of the course.
At
the end of an informal critique on Friday, we go out as a group
together to celebrate and to relax.
We go to dinner in a beautiful town, Castiglione del Lago, which
juts into the wonderful Lago Trasimeno, the largest lake on the Italian
peninsular.
The restaurant, very popular with locals and tourists, has
a large atmospheric outside courtyard where we enjoy our meal.
Then
it's the final day of the course and guests will be taken back to Chiusi
station for various train connections to airports or wherever they may
be going on to in Italy.
This is the bit where we all say goodbye, swap
email addresses and promise to come again next year.
