Experience Seminars - Understanding your digital EOS (Part 1)

I've just come back from attending Experience Seminar's "Understanding your digital EOS (Part 1)" course at their training centre in Huntingdon and was thoroughly impressed.

I've owned a Canon dSLR for a few years now (originally a 350D and more recently upgraded to a 40D) and although I had a basic general understanding of concepts like aperture, exposure and ISO, and tried to apply them to my photography, shooting mostly in Program mode, it was great to have some of the chasm-like gaps in my self-taught knowledge filled in.

The course covered what they call the "Basic Overrides", and included topics such as AWB, WB presets, ISO and using 'Tv' and 'Av' modes to control aperture and shutter speeds independently, before finally working towards Program mode. The course content was backed up with image slideshows containing loads of example situations (fast moving objects, portrait, landscape, low light, fireworks, etc) along with guidance on which settings would produce the best results in the form of the image EXIF information alongside. For me this part was the most useful as it often took seeing a picture at a particular aperture or shutter time setting to make sense of it all.

Their training centre is well laid out and professionally ran and although a bit remote, is easy to get to by car and is surrounded by beautiful Cambridgshire countryside. I only regret not getting there earlier in the morning to take some shots!

I'm enrolled on their Part 2 course later on in the year so I'll report back.