Intro to Digital Photography in Napier

The first exercises are about looking, then about the few settings that change a picture. Napier's Art Deco precinct is an ideal beginner location because the subjects are big, still and colourful: pastel façades, geometric details, period lettering. Walk Tennyson and Emerson Streets in the late afternoon and the exercises about where to stand, what to leave out and how light falls on a surface all have obvious answers.

Marine Parade is the second stop: a long, flat promenade with the sea on one side and gardens, the Sound Shell, the Pania statue and the fountain on the other. It gives you your first horizon-placement exercise, your first moving subject in the waves and the gulls, and, at dusk, your first lit fountain. Ahuriri's inner harbour gives you boats, reflections and the National Tobacco Company building, one of the most photographed doorways in the country.

You do not need a car or a long lens to finish this course. The assignments reward ordinary Hawke's Bay seen carefully: an orchard in blossom on the Heretaunga Plains, vine rows in winter, the Saturday farmers market at the Hastings showgrounds. Upload what you make and your tutor will tell you what is working. Hawke's Bay's sunshine means you will rarely lose a shoot to rain, and its hard midday light teaches you early to love the edges of the day.