Snaps for Sassy! We check out the Hong Kong School of Photography

Click, click, click – and boom, you get some great snaps for a Facebook album. More clicks and you have something for Instagram. There’s nothing wrong with a well-composed picture of your lunch or a post-makeover selfie in great lighting, but I wanted to learn a bit more about photography…

My aim was to know how to use a real DSLR camera (Digital single-lens reflex camera, for those of you who didn’t know – don’t worry, I didn’t either!) to capture some truly amazing moments. Enter Hong Kong School of Photography’s (HKSOP) One Day Starter course.

I borrowed my dad’s Canon 500D a few years ago on a family trip, and me being the cheeky daughter than I am – I never returned it to him. Trial and error was definitely the name of my game for a while. Figuring out what made a picture brighter or how to focus was not hard, but I was pretty excited to start learning about the technical aspects and names of all the fancy buttons on my camera.

We met early on a Saturday morning, and surprisingly there were clear blue skies and the weather was great (strange for Hong Kong!) – definitely a good sign. Howard from HKSOP sat five of us down and we jumped straight in.

He uses a Canon himself, so he was familiar with my camera functions. I was very impressed when he tackled some of the other students’ cameras – from Sonys to Nikons with practiced ease. It was definitely reassuring to know that we were being taught by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

Howard walked us around Central pier, and explained how to use the different functions on the camera to take different shots in different environments. He explained which mode to use, how to adjust the aperture, ways to control your flash, how to focus and how to change your camera settings so that the background would be blurred, amongst many other things.

The actual class went from 8am – 5pm, which was quite long in my opinion, but I did feel like we covered all the bases – and taking notes as we went along was so helpful when I looked over them later.

Altogether, it was a great experience for a beginner DSLR camera user and I would even recommend it for those who have zero experience taking photos. Perfect for those of you who receive a DSLR camera for your next birthday and decide you want something other than selfies in your next photo album…

www.hksop.com/one-day-starter-course