Just wanted to say a massive thank you again for the Workshop which I thoroughly enjoyed and would love to take part next year too. I learnt so much and came away with so many ideas, it`s just putting everything into practice now.

This was my first photographic workshop and I was spoilt with the amazing locations that I was taken to, along with the tuition, support and advice that I was given by David and Jonathan. It's not jump out the bus take a shot and move on workshop, its a carefully constructed course that sent me away inspired and with a different outlook to photography.

Thanks once again for a great workshop. Both Karen and I had a great time and we really apprecaited the efforts by you, Wendy, John and Kevin to make the course informative, entertaining, fun and friendly.

David Noton is well known for his landscape work and also his travel photography. I was on his Umbrian workshop again this year and here a few of my wonderful experiences from this year's. David gave us a tutorial on travel flash photography, with a very patient model (thanks Wendy), which involved using one hand for the flash and one for the camera, using a slow shutter speed. This was followed by a practical exercise, well the group trying to practice these techniques. We set off to Norcia an old walled citadell, the home of the sausage and cheese in the region. If you want to see wild boar then this is the place to do it, rather than one of the groups methods (Paul)! After a little faffing around with my remote flash and commander unit and a little ribaldry, even from our esteemed experts. I managed to start practising some of the technques. The shop owners didn't mind people taking photographs in their shops, but politeness is the order of the day. I managed to create some interesting images and found it very useful exercise. I think some of the others didn't bother and were perhaps more exercised in a bar!
The next day we photographed a shepherd and also a sausage manufacturer, where these techniques could be further used. The sausage man took us into this very small, dark( pitch black), dank room, full of wrinkled sausages and hams. Us maybe? Perhaps this was one of David and Jon's cunning jokes. Anyway the practice paid off, I used an off camera cable for my flash, to make sure I had no technical problems, and some of those in the group saw the benefit, as I was shooting with a low ISO and they used high ones. I produced some portraits that I am very pleased with. Along with the photographic techniques learnt during the workshop, I also gained some very useful off road tehcniques and advice which enabled me to tackle one of the mountains myself.
Many thanks to David and Wendy Noton , Jonathon Gooding and Il Collacio for making an excellent workshop, that I would thoroughly recommend.
Dom Pinson
'Workshop Groupie' (thanks Graham)

Its pre-dawn, but only just, and we're still hurtling through the green and pleasant land of the Monte Sibillini. Yesterdays pre-dawn turned into a muted sunrise over the Piano Grande with everything thrown in except the mist that we were really waiting for. This morning is also shaping up to be mist free - one of the themes of the week - but thats not whats bothering the guvnor. We're late, on the drag, behind schedule - and the rising of the sun waits for no man, not even D Noton Esq. We thunder past the turn to the Piano Grande, right a bit and on a bit up to the Forca Canapine. We push a bit further off road than the rough track allowed for, and the sound of eight 4X4 tyres scrunching on gravel is immediately replaced by the gravelly scrunching of 24 booted feet, multinational swearing and the ritual untangling of 36 tripod legs. Twelve multinational, fully booted photographers then scatter across the ample hillsides like coakroaches in a torch beam, each vaguely LowePro shaped. The guys in the red goretex jackets make good and sure they head lower down the hill, just so they can be picked out in every foreground of the folks who elected to stay high, and everybody finds Their Place. Once the breathing returns to normal, the camera is sitting firm on the tripod and the filters, cable releases and sandwiches are all in place theres a chance to look around and work out what to point at. Its very quiet, the sun is already picking out the thickly wooded hillsides to the right, the snow covered tops of the mountains receding into the distance - and the fact that there are no flowers whatsoever to inject colour in to the foregound. Its beautiful - but we're going to have to work a bit at this one.

There is something to be said for being thrown into a totally new location at a critical point in the day when there is little time to properly take stock of the treats available. I think I learned more about my photography that morning by having to make rapid decisions about what to shoot and how to shoot it before the light went all wrong than at any other session. Normally some level of planning and expectation can guide the choices you make, not so when the sun is getting stronger by the minute and is frying your pixels, the trees and mountain tops are lighting up like fireworks and you have to avoid the buggers in the red goretex jackets. Go with what strikes you - it works - most of the time, and it brings a kind of immediacy to photographing landscapes that you normally try to avoid. Great fun! Better yet in that session was the group's discovery that full Lowepro's can roll - downhill - quite quickly - at least as fast as their owners can run.

In the four days of the workshop we covered everything from sweeping hill top vistas, quaint little Italian towns impossibly glued to the sides of hills, driving flocks of dim looking Italian sheep led by a hopelessly extrovert shepherd, the malodorous traditional meat processing skills as practised by a local farmer and lots and lots of photos. There were poppies and yellow jobbies by the boatload, truffles at every turn, an encounter with wild boar and a savage mauling from an Italian sheepdog who thankfully only took a mouthful of my sock, and even more photos. The accommodation was great, the location was perfect - for every predawn 4X4 hike there was another where a 200 metre stumble from your bed got you a prize winning print, the group gelled instantly and the food was as plentiful and as good as the wine.

Unquestionably a great week - but I'd hesitate to reccommend it to anyone else as I'd like there to be space on it for me again next year. Like the man said, I'll be back.

I very much enjoyed meeting both of you and indeed everyone on the workshop. I think we had a particularly good crowd and were very lucky to have so many interesting characters. It was brilliant marketing to have the facility for partners to accompany the photographers and made for a much more social and rounded occasion. The venue was simply perfect too, both Il Collaccio and the Umbria region, and I hope I will be able to return to both very soon.

I had a great time and I must admit I learned far more than I could have imagined too. I guess, having been concentrating on microstock for the last 3 years, I have got into an almsot machine-like attitude to my photography, with rather too much emphasis on quantity and not enough thought about creativity. With microstock being largely about the sale of huge volumes of images at ridiculously low prices then to some extent, to make it work commercially, you also have to produce high volumes of images at a low per-image cost. That's my excuse anyway - you and Jon managed to disguise your disgust with remarkable fortitude!

Although we weren't lucky with the weather on reflection I think it actually made little difference to the learning experience - if anything the challenging conditions promoted us to have to think harder about the creative opportunities and overcoming such difficulties.

After David did all the work for us in finding locations, he took us to this location, a poppy field close to the hotel at the crack of dawn. This is customer service, as my wife had demanded shots with poppies in! The poppy field itself was lovely (well they were before 10 photographers trampled on many of them). After I found a decent spot, without any other photographers in the field of vision, I set up the trusty tripod & waited while the sun played on the hills and the early morning mist came & went. For this shot I even had to play with one of the poppies in the foreground, to open it up a little. I learned about the value of ND grad filters on this course but, as I had none at the time, this is a bracketed shot, merged in Photoshop.

One of the challenges of the workshop was to shoot Santino, the shepherd. Now, this was good fun. Men are not normally good at multi-tasking but this shot required walking backwards, composing (I wanted Santino, sheep, dogs AND the village in the background), exposing correctly, staying clear of the rather scary dogs AND avoiding the 10 others all running backwards. Great fun! I had to remove Kevin and some unsightly telephone poles in Photoshop for this finally.

This is absolutely my favourite shot of the weekend. David & the team tried so hard to find fabulous locations with interesting weather for us & this proves how well they did! This location required some serious hill walking to get to it (300m at speed, to get there for the right light) but was WELL worth it. I particularly like the way the sun plays on the village and the hills, the clouds 'pouring' onto the hill and the colours on the Piano Grande. Again, as I did not have any ND grads at the time, this is a composite of two bracketed shots in Photoshop, one for the highlights in the top half & one for the shadows in the bottom.

I just want to thank you, Wendy, and John for an informative and excellent workshop, and a thoroughly enjoyable weekend break. An appreciation of the subtleties of light, a deep attachment to truffles, and an abiding concern for the lives of Italian shepherds were just some of my take home experiences!

Chasing the light

Screaming down the narrow lanes of the Norcian countryside, rental car pushed to the limit, tires screeching and dust billowing as hairpin bends are haphazardly dismissed in hot pursuit of Noton's 9 and a convincing explanation. There were once 10.

Packed the wrong lens and gear, had to head back to the room to rekit. No problem, be back in 5, we'll wait and take the count. Nothing but tire tracks, disturbed poppies blowing unnaturally in the wind, and a palable sense of injustice to guide me on my chase.

Eight months of photographic anticipation, four thousand miles clocked on airlines, from Arabian dust-storms to Umbrian downpours, no stone left unturned in the quest for the perfect light.

Chasing more than just the light...

We’d covered most things during the Umbrian workshop; location finding, exposure, filters and raw processing but I couldn’t remember Wild Boar being part of the itinerary. Cinghiale certainly featured on the menu at Il Collacio but here I was facing four of our porcine friends armed only with a tripod and a camera backpack. Hmmmm.

At 28 stone, faster than an Olympic sprinter, agile as a ballerina and more bristly than an Umbrian maid’s yard brush, large male’s are not to be underestimated and it was clear “Big Daddy” was not happy that I’d (inadvertently) spooked one of his entourage. A loud snort, paw of the ground and step in my direction was all the encouragement I needed to make a swift, but cautious, exit – not an easy manoeuvre with 10kg of camera gear on my back and wobbly knees (well they were by now friends!). Evidently “Big Daddy” liked my style and decided to follow me for a while until, eventually losing interest, he grunted at me once more and lead his family away.

A thrilling experience for sure, and a privilege, to see wild animals in their environment. Being amongst a group of photographers, I was asked the inevitable question – “did you get the shot?” No. Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin!