Shorts - Short Course Elements

 NEW   New low cost Quick start courses. These are designed to get you started, using what you have now, economically, and rapidly. You would get to be able to achieve more than you would by attending a group course but not get the depth of knowledge and experience you would on our other courses.

Introduction

'Shorts' are in effect short training courses, they are 3 hours long. We look on them as training elements. They can be used to extend your skill into a new area, to look at a specific aspect in more detail, to look at a business market, to have an open discussion session to form a practical session. Like Masterclasses they can also build on existing knowledge.

You can take a single 'short' or have 2 or 3 in a day.

Even if you were to do just one, being its 1 to 1 tuition you would achieve far more than you would on a day on a group course. They are most cost effective when you put them together and make maximum use of your travelling and other costs.

There were three initial reasons to develop 'shorts' to allow shorter elements to make it easier for you to construct the course you wanted, secondly to allow people attending training for a number of days to choose to add extra training elements in some of the evenings, and thirdly to widen the customer support options, including colour profiling, upgrading to another camera and much more. Of course many people see them as a  useful option in their own right.

Under the unified pricing system we now use, this is very attractive, three hours is three training units, the equivalent of only £171 currently, or could be far less if you have obtained a block of training vouchers at a discount.

If you think of a day made up of 'shorts', then we have 3 shorts to a day

• Morning    9am to 12 noon

• Afternoon 1:30 pm to 4:30pm

• Evening    6:30pm to 9:30pm

Times may be able to be adjusted slightly, they are spread to allow for overrun, and resetting the work, getting items out, preparation etc between sessions.

So what can you achieve with a 'short'.  Just under half you could on a full day, more than you could by attending a small group course and as much as you would in several days attending a classroom sized group.

Most of our courses we can trim, omitting some information so as to allow it to be undertaken as a 'short', but there are only two that we cannot cope with so easily, these are

• The HNK - Hands on a Nikon, this is difficult to get into a 7 hour day and often overruns. However we have constructed a group of three shorts, that cover the same ground.
• The CNX - Capture NX editing, could be run as a demonstration only, but if you did not actually have any hands on yourself it is unlikely that you would remember half as much and its often when we are supporting you to edit in the practical session, that people get to really see the practical ways to make things work, however it would still be better than attending a group class on the subject.

Flash and studio breaks into two halves quite easily, so although we couldn't cover flash, studio, and portraiture in a single 'short'. We can break it into several and have one for using the cameras in built and external flash, and a second for studio, either looking at the mains based studio system or the Nikon creative lighting system. Similarly you could have a short that was just photographing a model, and spend the first half hour setting up, do photography for 2 hours with a model present and then look over very quickly what had been achieved.

Tidying up and revision topics, assisting you to overcome areas of concern after you have already done a HNK is possible, and some who perhaps did the HNK course and then were just so busy that they never got around to putting it into practice may find a 'short', going over the main points quickly but mostly hands on, would assist them.

Similarly those who have undertaken a HNK course with one camera and now decided to upgrade to a later or more advanced one will find the short is just right to cover the new camera, its controls and menus.

On the customer support side, a 'short' would allow you to bring in your laptop or computer and printer, and to profile your printer, as well as look at colour management. It could also be used for  'edit and print' to bring in some of your work to edit up with us here and produce exhibition quality prints. If we are using Capture NX we are going to be able to achieve a lot in a 3 hour 'short', if you want us to use Photoshop CS or CS3, then we can but will not get through anything like the same amount.

Booking a 'short'

Booking a short is now similar to booking any other course. If you want to book 2 or more in a day you can select any day that has available time. On the calendar some days have 'short' availability shown.

To allow us to use shorts we have divided the day into three sessions, Morning, Afternoon and Evening, abbreviated to MAE on the calendar. In some cases you will find days with some of these sessions not available, either because they have been booked or because we have other commitments, where this has occurred one or more of the MAE letters will have been changed to an X, for example if the morning session is not available it will be shown as XAE. Where there is something else booked in part of the day but a short session is still available you will see the letter for that short session shown against a green background.

You can mix shorts with any of our other courses and with the Photography Skills masterclasses.

If you have any problem then either call or email us.

Click here to move to the shorts website, to see details on each short available, you can get back again.

List of Shorts currently defined

We have three new quick start courses available at the moment, that are no in the list below:-

• Quick Start:- Getting started with your camera

• Quick Start:- Flash

• Quick Start:- Capture NX editing

Click here to move to the shorts website, to see details on each short available, you can get back again.

Click here to move to the shorts website, to see details on each short available, you can get back again.