I had the immense pleasure of being asked by Co-op Academies Trust to deliver a day of photography training for employees with marketing roles from across the trust. The aim of the day was to help each participant learn the basics of photography and take better photographs of everyday school life.
In the morning we spent time learning about the exposure triangle – aperture, shutter speed and ISO – and how these affected each other and the look of the photographs. I’m a firm believer that we need to use the brilliant features of our expensive cameras and let them do some of the work for us, so we looked at both manual and semi-automatic settings. We had five different brands of camera and no two models were the same, but after some Googling and trial and error, we got everyone set up ready to go.
We headed outside to experiment with what we had learnt. We were particularly looking at taking images with a shallow depth of field. This is because this style of image is brilliant for adding text. We looked at how to get this effect using both the lens and the aperture.
Everyone then had a turn at photographing Danika, Head of Marketing and Engagement, riding on a scooter. This was fun! And really important for practising different techniques to use at school sport events.
After lunch, we looked at different ways to take engaging photographs that were not reliant on camera technology. We covered setting up different compositions, and how colour and light affect images. We also made our own classroom scenario to practice in. The participants took turns modelling and got very into creating their own art! Check out those concentration faces.
The final activity of the day was to take a mixture of headshots and group photographs. This was a really important part of the day as the participants said they are often asked to take photographs of new starters and award winners in their education setting. We all really enjoyed using the space inside Angel Square to take these and used lots of techniques we had discussed to make the images more interesting.
Thanks so much for having me along, Co-op Academies Trust. I hope this day of training really helped you all improve your photography in your schools.
Fancy putting on a similar event for your trust? Just drop me an email to discuss. Want to see more photos? Head to my portfolio.
