Paul Wilde has gone and got picture of the week in the Sunday Times, again!

Paul did some one-to-one teaching with Phil back in 2009 – he was good then, but he’s even better now!!  Here’s the testimonial he wrote at the time:

“…My tiny brain did take in an awful lot of what you said and the quality and breadth of pics has improved. I am happily going around the dial into uncharted waters (often using a 2nd pic in ‘P’ just in case.) Your notes are very useful as an aid memoir, I just need some time to put everything in place. Thanks once again for your invaluable time last week, you did spoil me with the time you spent and it was very much appreciated. If I get any opportunities to recommend your company I will be very pleased to do so…”

Well done Paul!

We are thrilled to announce that starting in January 2012 we will be able to offer our courses at the National Media Museum in Bradford. Formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, this is a state-of-the-art venue – an inspirational place to work and just to mooch around and check out all the exhibits you would expect at a world-class photography museum. There are artefacts from the early days of photography, as well as travelling exhibitions of the latest world-class work.  Have a look at their wikipedia entry.

You can even photograph Morph in his native habitat (a TV studio), Phil took this:

There’s a lot of this kind of thing:

Wallace and Gromit at full tilt, picture by Phil

Evil penguin at work from The Wrong Trousers, pic by Phil again (the original was shot frame by frame on Nikon D2H cameras, you know)

Captain Scarlet

The mighty Talos, from Jason and the Argonauts  - Ray Harryhausen’s estate has donated many of his models to the museum.

and the mighty Great Uncle Bulgaria, from the Wombles.

We’re really looking forward to teaching our photography courses in Bradford. Hope to see you there!

Here is a selection of pictures from this month’s mentoring.  We were really pleased to see such a diversity of images, subjects and even cameras!  We’ve shown a dozen – look out for next month’s selection in early January!

As the flowers die off it’s a great time of year to photograph mushrooms. Consider using a bit of flash – this tends to make them light up in a weird way, which is often what your picture is saying – look this weird thing!

Give it a go – and if you send them to us we’ll stick them on the blog!

People often ask us questions on our photography courses, and we see a lot of people, but we often get the same questions.  The new Ask PMS feature is intended to help –  ask us a question and we’ll write an article to explain it.  Here’s the latest one.

We are feeling extremely privileged to have been involved with the ‘Faith Through A Lens’ competition, which had the final prize giving last night at the Bradford Media Museum. The amazing photographer Don McCullin was the main judge. The finalists’ photographs were stunning, and very diverse. Not any easy job to judge!

We were asked if we would donate prizes for the finalists, which we were delighted to do. Each of them (10) got Gift Certificates to come on one of our nationwide courses, and the 3 winners got to have one to one tuition with us. The overall winner gets us for a day in his own home, which just happens to be in Northern Ireland! So we are off on another adventure next Spring. That’s really exciting as we were thinking that we should run courses over there anyway!

Don is such a lovely man, and just being in his presence is inspiring…what a legend! We look forward to working with them again next year.

Paul wins first prize – see you in the Spring, Paul!

Thought this came out rather well during a recent photography course. We’ve often had the problem of how do you shoot reflective things without getting yourself in the picture? So by putting the pearls on a really bright surface (an overhead projector) the reflections of the photographer were completely blown out.

Bear in mind that the camera is not remotely designed to do shots like this, so you need to think about exposure compensation and white balance.

Ben Houghton came along to Ashton Court for a landscape photography course. He’s self taught and has his flickr stream shows, he’s rather good! He also uses a rather ancient Nikon D80 but as we always say, it’s not the kit, it’s the eye:






Rachel was able to talk through potential upgrade paths for his equipment, and also some business ideas for making money from his obvious talent.

We had two large groups at Sheffield Park Gardens this time, and Rachel’s creative group had a great time in the Gardens, breaking some of the rules of photography (assuming there are any rules in the first place). It’s all about reflections at Sheffield Park:

We got carried away with the trees at Hatchlands Park near Guildford:

Jenn got great depth of field, even with a kit lens.

Ann knows these trees well, so we had to have a think about how to take them differently:

The tricky bit was avoiding planes on the Heathrow flightpath!