Little Bundles Residential Training

This past week I have had the privilege of attending a week long residential in Uppermore Barn in the beautiful Derbyshire countryside.  As a newborn photographer I feel it is my duty to ensure that I am up to date in my training and so this was a great opportunity to refresh my skills in many areas including lighting, editing, business & marketing, posing, wrapping and safety.  We had a number of photo shoots with both newborns and some young children, all of which were amazingly well behaved, even with 13 photographers all snapping around them!

The course was run by my long standing mentor, Claire Elliott who is a panel judge for the Guild of Photographers, but also runs her own successful newborn and children's photography business, along with an international lighting specialist and Guild of Photographers panel judge, Andrew Appleton, wedding and business specialist Julie Oswin, and award winning photographer Ozzie Malik - we were like sponges learning from these highly skilled people!

Models were brought in and we would discuss the styling, the lighting and posing was done by Claire and then we had the chance to photograph the babies and children and apply our new editing processes afterwards.  This was a fantastic experience to continue in  my development, as photography is one of those trades were you are always learning and improving - so it never gets boring!  I have photographed nearly 100 newborns now and I still feel I change and improve with every photo shoot!

These little girls were so beautiful and a delight to photograph!

As part of the course we also did 5 hours of Continued Professional Development in First Aid and was tailored to photographers.  First Aid is such an important thing for us all to do, and I can recommend two great training providers in Marlow - Child Matters and Mini First Aid.

Lighting was also a large area of learning with Andrew and this was for studio lighting, but also on and off camera flash for outdoor photo shoots, so a real array of different types of lighting, and as you can see, we created some quite different looks!

Along with learning from the trainers, it was also a great experience to learn from fellow photographers, all at different stages in our careers with varying amounts of experience.  These types of residential's are great for people like me, who are self employed and don't have a team of people to work with and so we literally spoke, breathed and slept (although not much sleep was had!) photography - brilliant fun!

Overall this was a great week away and I have learnt a lot and can't wait to put these new skills into practice!