MelenTraining First Photography Courses 2006

This was my first ever photography course for compact cameras, on the 22nd April 2006.  It was for beginners, a trial session really, a fun day and they picked up a few tips.

I learned a lot about photography training that day, and from the second course in June 2006, when I set up MelenCourses, as it was then, having since changed to MelenTraining for courses, workshops and 1:1 sessions.

This beginners course was based in the lovely village of Aldbury, near Tring in the Chilterns, and I've used it quite a few times since.

MelenTraining first photography course in 2006

This was my second attempt at teaching photography to beginners, on another compact camera course on the 24th June 2006.  Lucky with the weather again!

From these early courses I learned what people needed and what a course should include — sometimes less is more.  It was MelenCourses then, but now MelenTraining, and you can find current courses, workshops and 1:1 sessions there too.

This beginners course was based in the lovely village of Little Gaddesden, near Berkhamsted in the Chilterns, and I've used it a few times since.

MelenTraining second photography course in 2006

A training video for beginner photographers, using an Olympus Camedia C70.  This was one of the first ideas I had to help photographers back in 2006.  Because digital photography was new, quite a few inexperienced photographers weren't confident enough to insert either the battery or the card into the camera themselves, so waited until they came on one of my courses to do it.  This video was made to help them, though they still tended to wait until the day of the course anyway.

Cameras were different 15 years ago — similar shape, but much cheaper and with far fewer pixels.  The C70 was quite a good little camera, great for holidays and days out, with a 7.1 megapixel image at a fairly decent size.  The 5x optical zoom was handy too, 38–190mm in 35mm format, and the camera itself was easy to use.  It was known as the C-7000 in the US and the C-70 Zoom here in Europe, launched in September 2004 — you can still find the original DPReview review from back then.

The 1GB card made me laugh — I'd forgotten how small XD cards used to be, though it seemed adequate at the time, and far larger than the 1 and 2MB cards that came with the Casio QV-10 a decade earlier.  I actually picked up a C70 recently myself, purely for the nostalgia of it — nice to hold the same camera that started all this again nearly twenty years on.

Olympus Camedia C70 - MelenTraining 2006

Twenty years on from that first course in Aldbury, MelenTraining is still going — you can see how far things have come, and what's currently on offer, at melentraining.co.uk, including the full range of training videos made since.