Fabulous weather and a beautiful time of the year combined to give this new course an excellent start. Jon Sturdy, the tutor, prefers the hands-on approach so participants were set various photographic tasks and lectures were kept to a minimum.

Tasks included capturing the swirls and sparkles on running water; tiny insects flying just above the surface of water; depth of focus experiments, with all of us standing in a long receding line; how to photograph flying birds and tiny flowers; how many shots it was possible to take in two minutes etc. This meant that people had to use the manual settings on their cameras rather than automatic. Jon explained that it was like driving a car: the controls on the camera had to become completely familiar.

The results were viewed on a laptop, which was not ideal, so we shall have a projector and screen next year. What was amazing, to me at least, was how the shots could be manipulated with the use of the software programme Lightroom. For instance, Isaac took a picture of an irridescent blue dragonfly on some leaves and Jon was able to turn the background black and white, leaving only the insect coloured.

One of the highlights was meeting up at 6 am in full sunshine to wait for the barn owls to come out of the strawbale owl tower. Of course they didn't, but some of us saw them later flying around the house and pond. All agreed that the light at that time of the morning was so much more dramatic than a few hours later on in the day, when we were having breakfast of bacon sarnis.

The next course will be on 22/23 May 2010.