To further hone my wedding photography skills and learn to capture the perfect moment I decided to enrol on a popular wedding photography course offered by The Trained Eye, a leading photography school based in the rolling Cotswolds countryside near Amersham. I found myself on a Monday morning waiting for a Metropolitan line train where I got off at Chalfont and Latimer then cycled on my folding bike along country lanes to a small village called Coleshill. This offered a refreshing change from the daily routine of cycling to the British Library through the heart of London!

After some refreshments, we were introduced to Mike Garrard who is the original founder, and Nadine Van Biljon who was originally in the course ten years ago and even pointed out the same chair she sat in. From there on I knew our group were going to be in great hands and that it would be a very intense three days of learning. The course is structured so that you do photoshoots on the first two days and then spend the third day learning more business relevant elements and of course photo editing in Lightroom. Despite having worked in photography for ten years, Lightroom was something of an enigma for me, and I definitely needed instruction. For me, learning through You Tube videos and online blogs brings up so much conflicting advice that it is easy to go down rabbit holes and end up at the end of the day just having scrolled down more of Instagram than I otherwise would have. So in addition to obtaining more shots for my portfolio, I would also have good instruction in the basis of mass photo editing. To top it off I lucked out with the course participants, a very proactive group who is maintaining a WhatsApp channel so that we can continued to get guidance and recommendations even after the end of the course.

To mention what was learnt could take several blogs but there were parts of photography that always eluded me and my understanding, especially the rule of thirds. Up to this course, my compositional abilities were purely as a result of eye only, and framing things to the centre of the image however now I have many more ways of composing photos up my sleeve. The way the rule of thirds was explained meant that it barely took me five minutes to understand it. However when looking online in an unstructured environment, I would be staring befuddled at videos or at worse, buffering circles as videos failed to load on my laptop. As someone who suffers from elevated frustration due to Aspergers/Autism, this method of unstructured learning really fails me. So the outlay for the course was more than worth it for me.

The first venue we went to was Bisham Abbey, simply a gorgeous venue which was built around a 13th century manor house originally designed for the Knights Templar, a European religious army with branches mostly in western Europe. It was a challenge to focus the couple in front of the main door due to the myriad of fire escape and security signs posted over a glass partition door. One could edit those out however this is another example of where my current job in heritage digitisation differs – in my main job at the moment I do not do any photoshop work on items because they need to be kept as faithful to the original document as possible. However, with wedding photography you are creating memories. Unless you are photoshopping an estranged uncle or even the bride herself out of the frame, there is no problem with removing distracting elements. After all, as a new wedding photographer my aim is to build memories through my art, and removing distractions is part of that goal.

This image offered a real challenge in photo editing as there is a car immediately behind the faded fire escape sign to the left of the door! I gave myself 30 minutes on this image as I wanted to try and see if I could remove the clutter in that time to give me practise for when I need to manually edit images in a strict timeframe for real jobs. I was very happy with the result. Obviously I will try and limit my use of Photoshop itself because a) I always like trying to get the best results in my RAW images in the shot and b) Photoshopping takes away some of the originality of the image. Now the venue is probably falling foul of several health and safety laws without those signs! At the end of the first day, we went to a small church in the grounds where we were shown just how low the light is in traditional churches, and by extension a lot of wedding venues.

The second day involved a trip to Stoke Place, a large boutique hotel and conference venue where we were split into two groups and given time with the models to shoot in the grounds and in one of the bedrooms. I really enjoyed the more intimate setting because it meant that I could get a lot of use from my poker sharp 50mm lens. The low f-stop meant that I was able to get bright images in what was otherwise a low light setting and meant that I did not have to use flash, something that is definitely not recommended in some wedding venues!