Get snappy kids - in a good way - with these school hols classes

My husband bought a new camera lens earlier this year, poked it in my face at breakfast time to practise and declared ‘lovely bit of bokeh’. It’s a depth of field thing apparently that put my bleary eyes and spoonful of muesli in focus and softened the surrounding kitchen.

I would have much preferred if he’d gone outside to practise on flowers and bugs and that’s just what my nephew Harry (10) got up to last week when I took him to a Sharp Shots Photo Club children’s nature photography workshop at Borde Hill.

Over two and a half hours he learned all about focus and depth of field on a compact zoom camera and came up with some cracking pictures of which he (and his aunty) were justly proud.

Here, (minus the smiley poo emoticons) is his desciption of the day:

We practised first on model dinosaurs, I got T-Rex.

To do close ups you go on the flower setting and hold the button half down to focus then you press it all down. To take a shot from an interesting angle you go onto the portrait setting and tilt it up to make it portrait.

When we were out in the gardens the teacher said we could walk ten places from where she was standing – I did giant steps!

The trickiest thing you had to do was to capture water falling with it focused. Also butterflies went too fast to catch and bees wings were quick and blurry.

The best bit of the garden was the big house with flowers all around it. My favourite bit of the day was putting the waterproof camera underwater to try to take pictures of the fish.

Harry got to print his three favourite pictures on a nifty little machine at the end of the session.

The next Sharp Shots course in Sussex has a Summer at the Seaside theme and is at Yellowave, Brighton, it costs £39 for 7-11s and £45 for the teen session. There are more planned for October half term.

In an effort to challenge selfie culture Sharp Shots is also supporting a Royal Photographic Society competition encouraging young people to get behind the lens rather than in front of it to explore their identity.  Through a series of photographic images they are invited to tell the story of who they are. Prizes include cameras and a feature in an online gallery on The Royal Photographic Society’s website.

sharpshotsphotoclub.co.uk