Still developing! Maria learns new photography skills as she nears her 70th birthday

Maria has just completed a 10-week Photography evening class at Sim Balk Lane, having been unsuccessful on several past attempts to enrol for the in-demand York School of Art course where places fill up quickly.

Having previously belonged to amateur and social camera groups and attended a History of Photography class elsewhere, Maria has now developed new skills, including the production of a zine, working with Apple Macs and getting to grips with Adobe Photoshop.

She also passed Maths, English and Science GCSEs in later life and is in no mood to close her textbooks for good anytime soon.

“I’m nearly 70 now,” Maria declared. “But I enjoy being given challenges and felt I’d become stagnant with my photography. I needed to learn new things to look at and get that interest back and the course has given me that refocus.

“We did a zine. I’d heard about them on Instagram and now I know they’re a type of miniature magazine.

“We chose some of our photographs that we’d created on the course to put in it and it was great fun. I’ve also been using an Apple computer, rather than the Microsoft one I’m used to using and I enjoyed the challenge of doing an album cover. I used Photoshop and self portrait for that.”

Never one to stand still when it comes to engaging her brain and testing her creative mind, Maria is already thinking about what she’d like to do next. 

“I learned how to shoot with film and develop with film during the History of Photography class I did about 30 years ago but, now I’ve done this course, I’d like to do the Digital Photoshop class here,” she said. “I’d like to do GCSE Sociology as well and an accredited Photography course.

“The dream would be to do a degree in Photography but, at £9,000-a-year, I can’t afford it! I had to look at my finances and decide whether I could afford the £300 for this course, because I’m essentially a pensioner now and have to watch the pennies, but it was definitely value for money.”

York College do also run adult classes that are fully funded and others where the cost can be covered by an Advanced Learner Loan, dependant on student and course eligibility.

For Maria, the class provided a welcome boost, too, for her mental health, having spent a period of time supporting her daughter in Middlesbrough following a cancer diagnosis, helping to keep her care company running while she underwent an operation.

“I used to go to a little group in York called York Photography Network, but we lost the studio that we used to meet up in and I lost my mojo with photography a bit,” she pointed out, “After I came back from supporting my daughter, though, I had a bit of post-traumatic stress, so I wanted to get back into night classes.

“I’d been trying to get on this course for about three or four years, because it’s always full, so I was really pleased to finally get on it!”

To learn more about our Digital Photography evening class, please click here

Details on all our adult learning courses, meanwhile, can be found here

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