My virtual courses (Beginners and Advanced Photography, Visual Storytelling, Film, Creative Writing, Poetry) explore creative spaces through different resources, activities, discussions to deconstruct the world around us; to see differently.
There are also opportunities to share work in the sessions and to be part of this online collective exhibition.
Explore the amazing work of past members.
To book a corporate course for your company
Nikolas Pelentritis
@npelentritis
Visual Storytelling (Photo Diaries) - Week Four
Image 1: Concrete Frame
Image 2: Heads Up!
Image 3: Winter Warmth
Image 4: Wobbly Bridge
Lockdown walks, made in response to the Photo Diaries session.
George Hayes
@george.s.hayes
Visual Storytelling (Photo Diaries) - Week Four
Crafting stories using the Unfold app, made in response to the Photo Diaries session.
Katerina Examiliotou
@kati_ex
Exploring Textures, Lines, Colours and Abstracts - Week One
Portraits - Week Two
Still Life - Week Three
Visual Storytelling - Week Four
Editing - Week Five
Portraits - Week Two
Image 1: Living Traces
Image 2: Finding My Light
Image 3: Household Mythologies: Europa and Zeus
Image 4: Park Day Didn’t Go As Planned
Image 5: Fields of Dreams
Image 6: Locked Down and Locked In
“Thanks for the course, I really enjoyed those past weeks! Especially the 'assignments' and the variety of things to try either during the call or afterwards. I even started thinking maybe it's time to get myself an actual camera...”
Helen O’Hare
Exploring Textures, Lines, Colour and Abstracts - Week One
Images made in response to the first session, navigating space through shapes, colours, lines and textures.
“The course was great at pushing you to look at photography in various ways and get you to step out of your comfort zone and try new things. It was an excellent course (the hour felt like 10 minutes)”.
Helen O’Hare
Elyse Howell-Price
@elysehp
Exploring Textures, Lines, Colours and Abstracts - Week One
Portraits - Week Two
Still Life - Week Three
Visual Storytelling - Week Four
Editing - Week Five
Round-up - Week Six
Taking Notice
“I’ve been taking part in a walking challenge during lockdown to increase the number of steps I take. This course has encouraged me to take notice of what’s around me and to journal my walks: especially when challenged to take photos from different perspectives. I live in a rural environment and this challenge provoked me to notice signs, letters and typeface. Even the signs were reminding me to ‘look’ and ‘slow.’ I loved creating a photo journal of my walk. Thanks for all of your encouragement and nudges Marie!”
Kate Pearson
Lucinda Cusack
Portraits - Week Two
Visual Storytelling - Week Four
Exploring Depth of Field - Week One and Two
Laura Bullock
Life Through a Prism
Debby Thomas
@debby_fancy
Eleanor Trenfield
Portraits - Week Two
Still Life - Week Three
Editing - Week Five
I loved Marie's classes, they are thoughtfully put together and really helped me to think more creatively about how I use photography to tell a story and give my photos more personal meaning.
My photos are some of my favourites from each week, exploring portraiture, still life, textures and experimentation with various apps. It helped me reflect on how we just point and click and move on...Now I am much more thoughtful about how I put my composition together and enjoy the process of seeing more and in greater depth.
Jamie Alker
@jamie2155512
Beginners Course
Visual Storytelling - Week Four
Story
This is the image I ended up making for the story session (week 4), so trying to include different angles, different types of shots and working with and around rules.
The bottom image was from using the self timer and then trying to get a freeze frame of myself in mid air, but looking back through the photos it worked better than I originally thought for different reasons than what I had originally gone for.
The middle photo is actually a composite, as trying to capture the shot as it actually was in real life wasn’t working due to the brightness of the sunlight making the camera screen too dim, so I ended up using photoshop to insert the photo I was trying to originally capture onto the camera screen.
Week Two - Portraits
Still Life - Week Three
StillLife
These are just a few of the photos I ended up taking for the second week, so it was mostly just playing around with the lighting to see what different effects I could achieve
Editing Week Five
BridgeFinal and BridgeOriginal
I ended up walking around in the rain, one Sunday morning to get some photos for the course. I came across the bridge in the photo and noticed the almost mirror like reflection from the rain, then edited it to straighten it up, decided to go black and white to focus on the shape of the bridge and the reflections more. Then cropped in a bit to get a nicer composition
MultipleExposures
I used 20 photos taken one after the other for this one, used Lightroom to tweak the saturation and experiment a bit, added a linear graduation to really emphasise the cloudy overcast weather and add a bit of drama, then used desktop Photoshop and the statistics/mean feature to merge the images into one, trying to recreate the effect of taking a single long exposure photo.
Ducks (Image One)
One of the photos I took for the editing week, but didn’t end up going with. This was a purely opportunistic shot as I was just finishing up after taking some photos of swallows(?) who were swooping along the river, when I spotted these three coming in for a coordinated landing, ended up going with a tighter crop on the ducks due to the distance, but I do like how they almost seem to be a sequence of one duck rather than three.
SwanNest (Image Three)
I took this one a bit further on from where I got the photo of the ducks, not much edited with this one, but the location of the nest amongst so much human activity was what caught my eye. Little bit of cropping and reducing the saturation to try and reflect the fact it was raining and capture that feeling while keeping the green of the vegetation.
LandscapeForStory (Image Four)
This is the landscape photo that I used for the story image, I did play around with the hue/saturation for the colours on this one, just to experiment a bit and draw out the colours of the sky and grass a little bit.
Advanced Photography
Forest Gap
There were two things that got my attention with this one, the gap between the two parts of the forest with the stark contrast between the green at the top and the bare branches below, with the bare branches almost reaching out towards each other from either side, and the single branch that was almost looked like it was trying to reach across from one side to the other. And then looking at the image afterwards, I really liked the dominance of the greens and browns, especially with the Y shape formed by the greens.
Close Up
This was a bit of luck, in that I had an inquisitive Dartmoor Pony that was really interested in trying to (unsuccessfully) get some of my food, and I was sitting on top of a rock with a zoom lens that put me at the ideal height to capture this shot inspired by some of the work we’d talked about in one of the sessions on wildlife photography.
Cinema Style 1 and 2
Both of these were from getting up to catch the golden hour in the morning and using a tripod with a 35mm prime lens to try and create a more cinemagraphic look and then experimenting with colour grading afterwards to emphasise that. I was really pleased with how they turned out, although I did notice that I had a tendency to look towards the wrong side of the frame!
Long Tilt
One of the photos for the ‘breaking a rule’ challenge, with this one I used a relatively long exposure and then tilted the camera down to try and create a more stretched out and overlaid look, from a few practice shots I settled on starting the tilt, then pressing the shutter and then halfway through stopped tilting to fix the foreground a little more.
Left or Right
Another of the photos for the ‘breaking a rule’ challenge where I tried to not use the rule of thirds as much, instead going with halves, which I also tried to combine with having one path to the right being well lit and green while the other path was darker, more brown. Which was pretty much what I had in front of me at the time as it was the fork in the path as I was walking back after exploring a forest near me.
Kaleidoscope 1 and 2
After the final session, I actually found that I had an old kaleidoscope filter for an old camera that I’d acquired and never used, as I now had a better idea what to do with it, I tried using it on a few of my lenses that it would fit on. I managed to get some interesting shots taking a self-portrait and also of a sheep using a slightly longer focal length lens (which is why it’s a bit more cropped in) and so keep it handy when I’m out and about.
Collection of photographs produced throughout the course
Nicola Davies
Portraits - Week Two
Exploring depth of field (aperture) - Week One and Two
Still Life - Week Three
Visual Storytelling - Week Four
Landscapes
Story Challenge - Week Four
Editing - Week Five
Tina Lawton
Portraits - Week Two
Visual Storytelling - Week Four
Editing - Week Five
Kathryn Fitzgibbon
@kat_ebony
Storytelling
Photographing Architecture
Creating a story/series
Textures, colour and leading lines
Kofi Kyei
@kofi.chay
Jean Proverbs
@prvbsjean
History in the Skies
Riding High
Grand Exit
Erupt
Water Craft
Inner Refection,
Look Up
Liquid Gold
Age Spots
It’s an Upside-down World
Will Scott-Gall
Conker, 2004-2023
Our path, hemmed by grasses with golden ears,
Is long and narrow. We walk single file.
Catherine moves briskly in front now
The wind tugging her, whining all the while.
That wind: how she tugs, gnaws and growls.
I know you're crying but I can't hear.
Above us, dark shapes fly out of control.
Unleashed! Set free to roam and barrel roll.
Catherine, surely you'll get blown off course?
Not likely! Your thoughts, deafening and hoarse,
Are fixed hard and fast in that space...
Catherine, where your best friend once anchored
You. She'd kept you grounded and enforced
Your wild aspirations. Without her, you're lost.
The priest
Loughrigg Fell. Langdale Pikes. Grasmoor
Dove Crag. Wasdale. Grey Friar.
These fells his churches, these peaks altars
He smiles. He often smiles.
Today is a feast day. All Saints.
He unzips his weather beaten
Much travelled wind cheater.
Looks out. Gives thanks. Holds all of it.
He tweaks his black and white collar
His black and white collie
Scampers up towards the heavens
The congregation come hither
A cairn for a pulpit
He smiles. He often smiles.
Hellvellyn. Striding Edge. Catbells
Sca Fell. Skiddaw. Old Man.
Peaks marked like stations of the cross.
He smiles. He often smiles.
Sun beams break through November’s clouds
Sharing from on high God’s glory
For all the world’s delight.
What three words mark this graced somewhere
This solemn day, this thirteenth crest?
Elite.Over.Fairness.
Watch this modern day priest’s story
This live streamed spectacle of light
This service of prayer
He smiles. He often smiles.
Thomas Rutter
Frances Hayes
