Room with a viewfinder

On a camomile lawn in the walled garden of a baronial mansion in the village of San Martino Sulla Marrucina, I'm learning about shutter speeds. Beyond the walls, vineyards stretch down undulating hills. Beyond them, the snow-dusted peaks of the Appenine mountains, the backbone of Italy, rise majestically to meet a bright blue sky. Within the walls, and less majestically, photography tutors Selwyn, Emily and James are doing star jumps as my fellow students and I learn how to capture moving subjects. It's the fourth day of my photography course and I feel as if my skills have come on in leaps and bounds. And indeed star jumps.

I was, of course, starting from a low base - and by low, I mean subterranean. I don't even own a digital camera. I would snap away on holiday, get the film processed on my return and eagerly pick up the photos only to wonder what, precisely, the photos were supposed to be of. Even ignoring the blurred ones, the photos affixed with quality control stickers which explained my errors, and those that featured extreme close-ups of my thumb, there were still only so many times that I could pretend that a duff photo was actually a terribly arty one. My photographs weren't so much frozen moments as soggy ones.

Hence, I was sceptical of Emily's assertion at the holiday's outset that anyone can learn to take good photos. (I'd heard the "Anyone can learn ..." line before, in relation to singing and swimming, neither of which I can manage despite lessons from experts).

As I was, at that point, lying prostrate in the bleached ruins of the medieval castle of Rocca Calascio staring through a viewfinder and wondering what I was supposed to be focusing on, I was not convinced I would learn much - other than how uncomfortable it is to lie on ruined medieval castles. Though the scenery was beautiful, I couldn't help but say "But it's just scenery." Hills are hills are hills after all and anyone can see them. Emily, a photographer with years of experience, sighed.

To her credit, though, she wasn't defeated and having led a lesson on composition, she dispatched me on my first assignment - to take a close-up, plus photographs that included leading lines (roads and the like that lead your eye into a photograph), negative space (expanses of sky or scenery against which the subject of a photograph is contrasted) and a frame-within-a-frame (windows, doorways or fence-posts that frame whatever's in your picture within the frame of the image itself).