Friday, October 12, 2007

Step aside David Bailey*

I have enrolled for a digital photography course. Its something I’d been meaning to do for a while but was spurred on by Chocolate & Cherries recent post. Then yesterday, I discovered my local authority offer a course at a bargain price and a convenient time and location for me. So I stopped dithering and phoned them to enrol. I was slightly embarrassed by giving the course title as ‘Digital Camera’ as it is in the course information as I’m sure Digital Photography would be more appropriate, but I made my booking undeterred.

I was feeling slightly smug about being so decisive until I remembered that my past experiences with the local authority’s adult education department have not been great. I have attempted to enrol on courses with them in the past, but they’ve either not sent the appropriate information until after the course has begun or cancelled the course due to lack of interest. And perhaps it will prove to be prophetic that the woman I enrolled with was at pains to take numerous contact numbers for me so they could get in touch “if we need to cancel it or you know something else”.

The other thought that has occurred to me since I signed away my Monday nights is that two hours on an evening in the winter is going to limited what photography we can do. So if it does go ahead (still a big if), look out for hundreds of shots of the inside of class room and west London at night.

* actually I think Martin Parr would be more appropriate, but for the sake of the title I went with the one photographer absolutely everyone knows.

4 comments:

cogidubnus said...

My daughter's on a photographic course at our local college - the classroom attendances are purely instructive/demonstrative - virtually all the coursework is performed solo and out of hours - it is by its nature something of a solitary pursuit, the social aspect being dependent on what you do with the finished product...

Or it could be you're being extremely witty and my sense of humour is seriously lacking tonight...

:-)

SandDancer said...

A bit of both. I do expect that we will have to do lots of photography outside of the class time but still I do think that we will need to do a bit during the course time to consolidate what we've learnt.

Anonymous said...

Good luck with the course - it sounds like fun!

My experience of evening classes isn't great either. As you say they get cancelled due to lack of interest or when I did find a spanish course, it was full of pensioners who'd got the course for free and after we'd learnt numbers and practiced with a bingo game, they only wanted to do that week in week out!

Spending my Monday evenings after work throughout winter playing bingo in Spanish with a bunch of unruly pensioners in the middle of Lancashire was not quite what I'd envisioned when I started...

Of course, my spanish counting is now superb but sadly that's all I mastered

SandDancer said...

NM - that's funny although I understand why you'd be disappointed. I seem to recall playing bingo when I did a Spanish course too although our average age was considerably lower so we didn't do it more than once.