We recently purchased a new digital SLR camera for the studio because our social media and blogs, our storyboards and scamps, even our 365 project all rely on a steady stream of photos. The Canon 550D is an impressive bit of kit, so we set up pro photography classes to help everyone take better pictures - these workshops are proving to be a success on many levels.

Whilst some of us are already fairly skilled photographers, this is the 'studio' camera, which means we will all need to use it at some point. When we head off to events and meetings we often take the camera with us, so we can capture our working lives and share our experiences. When this happens, we want everyone to feel confident, and quite frankly, we'd rather have pictures we can actually use. :)

So we brought in a big gun, we brought in David Thomson, and he's running a series of workshops in our studio. We've been working with Dave for a while; in fact he took the recent shots for our website and he's worked with us on a number of client projects over the past few years.

Lachlann used playing cards to experiment with depth of field

Dave's running us through the basics of how to use the digital SLR manually, each week focusing on exposure, aperture, shutter speed, ISO and white balance. He begins each lesson with the mechanics behind each one and he's using an old SLR to demonstrate. Then we put it into practice, taking various shots in and around the studio.

Our front end developer Lachlan admitted:

"I'm not a super keen photographer but the things I've learned over the past few weeks have opened up so many possibilities for me. I'm really enjoying the process of moving beyond point and click, now I'm thinking about apertures, focal lengths and shutter speeds; with just a little bit of knowledge you can get some pretty great results from a digital SLR."

Brian took pictures of Laclann, we're not sure why :)

Our in-house illustrator Brian was taught how to use a 35mm film SLR camera at Art School (some 10 years ago) and he's personally getting a lot out of the course because, in his words:

"…much of my knowledge had disappeared, like most film cameras, because I spend most of my time illustrating. This is a great refresher course".

The fact is, we're all enjoying the process of learning something new and brushing up our skills. Photography is an important part of digital and it's a quick win for supporting your blogs and social media efforts, helping to make articles more interesting.

I'd recommend getting your team together to do something like this. Whilst we've been bonding (always a good thing) we're all getting something out personally too, new skills that we can use at work and at home. And, at the end of the 4 classes each one of us will be able to take better photos (even the best of us) and no excuses.