Weekend before last I was invited to attend a photography workshop at the Millennium Copthorne Hotel in Sheffield. I was a little scared to attend a photography workshop with many established bloggers thinking I’d be the only one who had no clue about half the settings on my camera. I was quickly put at ease though as everyone at our table let out surprised squeals at each new thing we learned.
A few things I had known how to do, like change the lighting to tungsten when confronted with lights like in the hotel, but I’d never put these things into practice. Silly, I know. I’ve only had my camera for oh, five years or so, but haven’t really played around with the more in depth settings. About the only thing I could do was change the ISO around because our house is so dark I had to bump up the light somehow. 
{Changing the exposure compensation to see the difference it makes to your photos}After learning about shutter speeds, exposure compensation, manually setting focal points and much more, we got to head to the Sheffield United football stadium next door to put our learnings into practice. We partnered up to take pictures of each other changing the settings on our cameras to see the different results. Sian was my partner and she was very patient while I messed about with my settings and focus points. 
My camera’s auto focus, wasn’t playing and didn’t want to focus where I wanted, thus how manually setting the focus points come in super handy. In the below picture I set the focal point to Sians eye that was closest to the camera like we were taught, and got a much crisper image, and Sian perfectly in focus. Hooray!
We then messed about with using the exposure compensation, and lowering it to produce darker images. The below picture is edited in iPhoto to brighten it up a little, as I really liked the picture but obviously not how I’d taken it in my camera. 
We learned how to use a large depth of field to take landscape shots to get everything in focus by setting the focal point one third of the way between the foreground and background subjects. I struggle with this loads with scenery pictures if my camera is on autofocus, so this was great for me to learn. 
I was struggling with getting what I wanted in focus, and one of the women running the workshop helped me with my settings and viewpoints and I got the above pictures by just changing the focal points. I think I’m sold on taking it off manual focus now as you get so much more control. 
We were basically let loose to do what we wanted snapping photos of everything and all came together at the end for a group photo.I had such a great day, even from the start where the helpful hotel staff went out of their way to find me a charger adapter for my American camera battery charger. The hotel provided us with a really delicious lunch as well, the rhubarb creme brûlée probably being my favourite (I’ve got a sweet tooth, what can I say). The hotel put together a post from the day with more photography tips here if you’d like to check it out, which I suggest you do!
As for the workshop itself, I’ve been wanting to take a beginner photography workshop for so long and this one did not disappoint. I want to hop on all Pandora’s workshops now, but unfortunately I can’t make any of the dates In October or November sadly. I’ll be keeping an eagle eye on dates for next year though. Pandora did such a great job describing everything, and really made everything we learned seem so simple and answered any questions we had throughout the day. If you’d like to check out which workshops are available in Yorkshire, head to the Going Digital site. I’d love to attend the birds of prey one after taking another camera settings one.
Have you ever attended a photography workshop? Did you feel like you got a lot of out of?
**I was invited as a guest to attend the workshop at the hotel, but my opinions are my own**