On Friday morning I was a point, press and hope-to-get-a-good-one sort of photographer; by Sunday evening I knew the raison d'e^tre of an f-stop and could talk solarization, ambient lighting and reversals.

While these technicalities might not sound too taxing to the initiated, for an amateur like myself they have been known to cause frustration and hilarity after the photographs have been processed. The beauty of landscape courses, such as the one run at Losehill Hall, high in the Peak District of northern England, is that for an entire weekend one is immersed in some of the most spectacular countryside that Britain has to offer: the Peak District National Park, the oldest in Britain, visited by 30 million people each year.

Losehill Hall's photography courses, which include fungi and wildlife weekends as well as landscape courses, and a "Winter Wonderland Special," attract an eclectic mix. Our group include the retired head of mathematics at a Yorkshire school, a window-dresser from Derby and Jessie Flannigan, a 74-year-old grandmother from Edinburgh. Among these 24 old hands, I really was the novice; Jessie told me she had first borrowed a Box Brownie camera as a youngster and reeled off a roll of Scotland's Forth Bridge arcing high over the firth.