Intro to Digital Photography in Dunedin

The first exercises are about looking, then about the few settings that change a picture. The Dunedin Botanic Garden is the beginner's classroom: New Zealand's oldest, free, with a lower garden of lawns and the Water of Leith for practising where to stand, an upper garden with the rhododendron dell for colour in October, and an aviary for a first go at a moving subject through wire. The Octagon and the Railway Station give you a first architecture picture and, on Saturday mornings, the farmers market for people and food.

St Clair is the second stop: the esplanade, the salt-water pool and the surfers at the beach's south end, all safe and flat, with the sun coming up over the sea in front of you. Baldwin Street is the traditional Dunedin novelty shot and a real lesson in perspective; be considerate, it is a residential street.

You do not need a car or a long lens to complete this course. The assignments reward ordinary Dunedin seen carefully: a stone church in low winter light, fog on the harbour, the colour of a Warehouse Precinct mural. Upload what you make and your tutor will tell you what is working. Most students who go on to the Wildlife course started here, learning the camera before they pointed it at an albatross.