Creative Portrait Photography Course

You will learn tips and techniques of different aspects of the photgraphic portrait and you will apply them into practice to best apprach your subject and achieve the desired result. Exploring the work of famous portrait photographers you will be challenged to think and work creatively by making the best use of your camera.

About the tutor

Eva was born in Greece. After she was awarded a Greek State Foundation scholarship she moved to UK to complete a PhD in Arts and Communication at UCA. She is a qualified teacher holding a PGCE teaching certificate from the University of Brighton. She is currently working as a fine art photographer and photography tutor. In her artistic practice she is not using the photographic medium to produce a record and a document of the world, which is what we usually expect to see in a photograph. She is using it to question the nature of photography and to cause a tension in what we are looking at. She is playing between representation and abstraction. She was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2008 exhibition among numerous solo and group shows. www.playingandreality.co.uk/rt

Camera guidelines

1. Ideally, buy an SLR (digital if you want digital, film if you want film). SLRs are best if you want to really explore, or even just experiment with photography. There are non-SLR compact digital cameras nowadays that take very good quality pictures but certain key features are limited and therefore limit the photographers capacity to be more creative. Having said that many ex-students have completed the course with a compact and been very happy to continue using their compact cameras.
2. Canon and Nikon are the safest bets. Not because they are necessarily better, but because they are the biggest companies and therefore have a much wider range of lenses, accessories and equipment on the market (this is particularly true if you are interested in exploring the second-hand market).
3. Try some out in a shop. The most important things are whether you like it, and whether the way it works makes sense. I personally find the menu system in Canon cameras to be extremely user friendly. All the digital SLR manufacturers - Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony, Olympus, etc - make cameras that produce very good pictures and, to be honest, all have pretty similar features. Most important is whether you like how it feels in your hand, it's not too heavy or fiddly and if the menu system etc seems to make sense. So go to a shop and ask to play around with a few, and pick the one that 'feels' best (and you can afford!). If you really like the Sony, get the Sony. Photography isn't as much fun if you don't like your camera.