Do you want to be part of a community of photographers who are dedicated to improving their craft and maintaining a safe space for everyone to thrive? Guided by a compassionate and experienced photography tutor?

Our happy hobbyist membership is designed for hobbyist photographers who want to learn more about photography, meet new people and gain motivation to go out with their cameras. We hold monthly meet ups, can assign you photo buddies in your local area and in this particular membership you can pay as you go on our full and mini courses.

We also hold competitions, group projects and have live demos and edit with me sessions with our tutor Gem.

You can learn a lot from the paid courses, but also from the free resource pool that you get with this membership. This is the first step in to our community with Gem, your foot is in the door and you are welcome to come take a seat and sample our wares.

The benefits of joining our Happy Hobbyist membership include:

Access to our resource pool (for personal use only)

Our resource pool has been created with years worth of experience and with many hours of love. You can use it to get tips on all types of photography, from photographing flowers, composition guides, website recommendations infographics and much much more.  

Each resource is nicely designed to look good printed, you're welcome to print any you like for personal use. 

Quizzes

There are some starter quizzes in the membership at the moment, there will be more produced over time. Quizzes will also be in a printable format so feel free to use them with your camera club or local groups of photographers.

Paperwork Templates for Collaboration on Photoshoots

This includes a basic model release form and a basic shoot agreement. Our big cheese membership tier will have professional paperwork examples and I will put together a product that is purchasable on a one off basis for you as a happy hobbyist that has a wider range of paperwork examples in the future - Keep an eye out on our new releases posts in the community.

Photography Community Access

As a happy hobbyist member you are invited to join our support group. We have our facebook group here and our new community feature here is ready for all of your posts. It's a simplified version of our facebook community which works best when you use the search bar to look for keywords if you need to find information or posts about particular things. This community is ONLY viewable by big cheese members, unlike our facebook group which is open to everyone.

Photography Competitions

Competitions are held monthly with participants able to submit 1 image per month, it costs £5 for the entry to cover admin fees. The winner will receive a free 1 hour 1-2-1 session and a winners badge that can can be added to their image to show off their award winning shot.

Group Photography Projects

Each year we hold both 52 week projects and 365 or (366 on a leap year) projects. This is where you take a photo every day or every week and you post it to our facebook group with either #52weekproject or #366project tagged in the post. We have suggested themes to follow each week which are announced at 8:30am on a Monday morning.

Joining the group project gives a good feeling of accountability, keeps you practicing with your camera and includes you in our community - it's lovely to work on projects together.

Live Demos

Every so often I will pop a live demo up in the facebook group, talk about something photograph related or host a live editing session. The live editing sessions that I am calling our 'Edit with me' sessions are structured and run on the 3rd Monday of the month from 2-3pm. Pop it in your calendar on a recurring basis so you can come and say hi!

Monthly Meet Ups

At the moment we have a free monthly meet up where we find an interesting location nearby and gather to take photos over a couple of hours, these are informal session, some guidance will be available, but it's more to get to know each other a bit better and to get some quirky shots at the same time. 

Our monthly meet ups happen on the first Sunday of the month from 11-1pm at different locations. The event will be hosted on our facebook group and links and info sent via email too.

Courses

One of the reasons I decided to have a free membership tier is because a lot of my students said they would prefer a pay as you go model on courses. With this in mind courses are available for you to buy as a stand alone product from our courses page. There will also be mini courses released over time that you can pick and choose between which are smaller units of valuable information for improving certain aspects of photography. 

We have one course available to start off with, our 'How to use Lightroom Classic to Import, Edit and Export'

Have Your Say

I value every one of my members and without you, I wouldn't be able to do what I love! So please do have your say, what do you want to see from our courses and membership? Your thoughts are important to me, so please do use our feedback questionnaire if you have any ideas for new features, suggestions or feedback.

Updates

Weekly email updates will be sent out with links to our latest youtube videos, useful information on photography related news or offers, new courses and mini courses, course updates and when we add new resources to the resource pool.

There are options to upgrade to our savvy shooters membership and our going pro membership if you are ready to step it up a gear, and each of those memberships come with more perks, more time with Gem in group study sessions, Q&A's and you get discounts on 1-2-1 sessions by 10% when signed up to a paid membership.