Wildlife & Outdoor Photography Course for Beginners, Berkhamsted

Improve Your Wildlife and Bird Photography with Images That Are Sharp and in Focus, Bright and Colourful

Bird, Wildlife and Outdoor Photography Made Easy

Wildlife photography is hard. Getting the settings right, the timing, the patience, waiting around for hours — and all of a sudden a beautiful deer stands in front of you, or a large bird of prey passes by. You grab your camera, snap, and it's just a blurry, horrible mess. This is the kind of training I ran at Rectory Lane Cemetery and with the Greensand Country Landscape Partnership back in 2021 to 2023 — getting people ready with the right shutter speed, the right ISO, the right autofocus and tracking settings, before they went out on their own. Those specific courses have since finished, but you can book the same fundamentals through 1:1 training today.

Rectory Lane Cemetery, Berkhamsted.

There was an outdoor element to this too. Photograph in black and white, understand lens selection, use ND grads to darken skies or slow shutters for a blurred water effect. These sessions ran at Rectory Lane Cemetery during their Heritage Open Day on Saturday 16th September 2023 — two versions ran, a 90-minute DSLR and Compact System camera workshop covering framing, lighting and technique, and a separate iPhone workshop with a dedicated 30-minute editing segment, both set against the cemetery's Victorian backdrop as part of a wider day that included theatre, music, dance and guided tours of the graves. The small stuff matters too — leaves, conkers, bark. Get close, fill the frame, and the cemetery gives you as much practice as any woodland. Those sessions have since finished, but you can book the same training through 1:1 training or see all courses.

Greensand Country Landscape Partnership, Bedfordshire.

In March 2021, Greensand Country Landscape Partnership commissioned a series of free photography workshops, and the response was strong enough that they invited me back for more. One of those — a landscape and wildlife photography walk through the wood and heathland of Flitwick Moor — ran for small groups of six, covering filters, and slow and fast shutter speeds, the same fundamentals taught in this course. Those sessions have since finished, but you can book the same training through 1:1 training or see all courses.

Flitwick Moor is a proper bog — a Site of Special Scientific Interest, the largest wetland in Bedfordshire, with peat cut there right up until the 1960s. Boardwalks through wet woodland, ten species of sphagnum moss, water rail and warblers breeding in the reeds — a different challenge entirely from the cemetery. Part of the wider Greensand Country landscape. Once the fundamentals are second nature here, that's where you go next.