I’ve always loved a course. Not the sort with pressure and exams; I love the sort where you learn and you chat and you hopefully have a bit of fun.  And I like the opportunity to meet new people.

It was a combination of those things that resulted in signing up myself and Himself to a photography course at the adult education centre up the road. It wasn’t terribly well though through…I can only use my camera on its auto setting, He has been teaching himself from books and experience for years. It’s also going to make for a very frantic Thursday nights as His train gets in 10 minutes before the class starts and we’ve not worked out how we fit in eating, but details schmetails.  We started this week :o)

With adult education classes I find the mix of people deposited together in a room based on just one identical thread of interest really fascinating.  This class was no exception. I thought it might not be quite what I was looking for when we walked into a room of seven silent, retired men, all earnestly staring at nothing, but eventually more people joined and a bit of chatting started.  Mostly mine.

We were asked to go out in groups, take some portrait photos and find some spicy facts about each other. I thought I would be ok; my group included a James Bond look alike and I was sure he was a spy. Sadly not; he was a journalist. But that’s really cool! Was he freelance or did he write for a publication?  The latter? Oooh, which publication? Right. Farming Today. Yes, that’s, um, diverse. Where had he written before that? Ah. Poultry Weekly. We might struggle a little with the ‘spicy’ side of this assignment then… (Although not as much as I struggled with taking portrait photos of what I can only assume is the shyest man living in Beachville who wasn’t keen on looking at the camera, however much I chatted and got him talking about his spicy fact – an interest in archaeology? Lovely).  Himself  had an interesting group though, a gorgeous girl who was in training for a bikini competition…and Mr B who got terribly confused when he had to load the photographs to the shared drive and managed to share with us his collection of previously taken table legs, a number of photos of his car and a one of his nephews passport photo, because he thought he looked just like a serial killer…

It was great. We got homework.  We had to use some of the teachers top tips to take some photos of autumn to review this week.  Unfortunately one of the tips was using natural light and it has been grey and soggy all weekend. But I got a few. Still using auto, but we start with the numbers on the manual settings this week :o)