The need for notes
I’ve offered training courses for a few years now and it’s something I’ve always enjoyed. In the beginning I worked from memory, taking customers through their mode dial. I would demonstrate some effects as we talked, before further developing the ideas on a photowalk. This worked and while I received good feedback I had some difficulty keeping everything in order. I would come back to previously covered sections, and would dance around the syllabus unpredictably. Given my tangential enthusiasm I decided I needed some training notes.Version 1.0
The first iteration was something I wrote in Microsoft Word. I printed these the night before a training course, to a fanfare of cursing, as I wrangled my printer and its contrarian needs. Again initial feedback was good. The course had more structure while still allowing for breaks in the programme. The crux of my ‘Getting off Auto’ course is to lay the foundations for a photographer’s future practice. Training Notes served both as a stabilising influence and also gave my clients something to refer to once the course was over.Version 2.0
Six months ago the document evolved a step further. After producing an anthology of pictures and printing it with blurb.co.uk I decided to have the notes printed professionally. I used a medium quality paper that shows the example images nicely while still being easy to make notes on. For my clients it meant a cleaner, tidier, and more professional feeling document, it also reduced the number of hurried trips out to buy ink for me.