Blogger Photography Event with Gavin Forster

Earlier this month I attended a free event with local photographer, Gavin Forster. The short course was trialed on a few local bloggers, prior to Gavin introducing it to small businesses.I'm a keen amateur photographer, I love taking photographs and recording memories, though I'll admit I've always been a point and shoot kind of girl and worse still, I don't edit my photographs. For quite a while (and constant nagging from my Hubby) I've been on the look out for something to help me with the technical side of photography, so Gavin's course sounded ideal. Hubby bought me decent Nikon DSLR as a wedding gift and it seemed such a shame to have only used it on the automatic setting

Gavin provided a questionnaire for each attendee to fill in prior to the event, where we were asked what we would like to get from the course, giving him an opportunity to tailor the event to our needs.

The event took place at the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead, a venue I'd never even heard of before the course. I didn't get a chance to look round the gallery on the day as I had to rush off to collect my son, but I'll be visiting again for the Daisy Green Christmas market at the end of the month, when I;ll be able to have a proper look round. Six North East bloggers attended the event all with differing levels of photography experience and range of camera, from bridge and DSLR cameras to small digital cameras. Gavin was patient and knowledgeable from the offset. It was a refreshing change to hear someone tell you to use equipment you already have (who'd have know you could get great lighting and pictures from your bath tub?!), or products that don't cost the earth, rather than offer lists of 'essential' products that are way out of an amature photographers budget. We played around with a range of inanimate objects, photographing them in our own individual ways. It was interesting to see that everyone headed for the light and knew that better photographs come from well lit natural light. Gavin went on to tell us more aboutISO, shutter speed and aperture, a topic I find highly confusing. I was grateful to find the majority of the other bloggers seemed similar to me in terms of experience and camera knowledge which made me feel a little less stupid. I'll admit prior to the course, I'd never really looked at the settings on my camera before so it was great to be given the push to twiddle with my buttons, so to speak, when taking photographs. The advice and support from Gavin was great. He was full of helpful tips and hints, all of which are easy to achieve. I was unable to stay for the questions and answers at the end of the session but I still feel I picked up a lot of useful information from the course.