Big skies, great people, food to tell your friends about….oh and photofilms

The view across the Indian Ocean a stone's throw from our training in Dar es Salaam.

Of course I’m talking about me being here in east Africa courtesy of the British Council who have put on a photofilm training course for local journalists, photographers and students here in Dar es Salaam in beautiful Tanzania. And just to clarify…it’s full of all of the above – big beautiful skies, a bunch of people who are fun to work with and that are passionate (sometimes a little too passionate!), food that reminds me that I’m not in Bangladesh and a dash (lets say a large dash) of photofilm training.

I had a great trip here including a wonderful companion on my bus to the usually busy terminal five at Heathrow. We managed to get lost in conversation talking about salad, bread and pop up restaurants so that by the time I arrived at the joyous m25 the hunger had started to kick in. After a slightly bumpy flight over Africa we arrived at a ghost town of an airport in Dar es Salaam which I have to say worked pretty well for me. Pretty quick through the sarcastic immigration official, bags all safe and sounds and quickly into our taxi. It took a little longer to get our bags in the boot of the taxi due to the large subwoofer kicking out the tunes in the back but I encouraged our driver to crank the music up to 11 so that we could start our Sunday morning with our arms out of the window, the sun coming up and the music blaring (Yep that’s a big smile on my face..)

The group get caught up with some captivating examples of what a photofilm can really do..

We kicked off the week here in Tanzania’s capital with a seminar held at the British council’s graffiti adorned premises which had a bit of a sell out crowd. Georgina took to the stage to talk about the who, what, where and why of photofilms and explain away the ever confusing duckrabbit and it went down pretty well. I helped out when it came to the exhaustive questions and answers session which proved pretty popular with the audience and we got asked about when we were coming back to Tanzania more than once, which sounded good to me.

Abraham test's out his interviewing skills with Georgina

Haika practices her audio recorder skills with Fadilil

Since then we have been getting stuck into our four day training here which is being held at the British Council offices pretty near to the beautiful Indian Ocean here in Dar. We have 9 willing trainees from a whole bunch of different disciplines and age groups who have been working hard to get to grips with photofilms and some new techniques and kit.

Meanwhile Georgina and I have been working hard to get used to the heat, although I must admit the pool helps…