Community Training Course by Fleming Photographic
Knysna is a town in the heart of South Africa's beautiful Garden Route. Knysna lies nestled in between the Outeniqua Mountains and the Indian Ocean. There's a large lagoon that's perfect for water sports and surrounding forests that are great for walking, this makes it a haven for photography.
It is for this reason that we choose to set up our photographic business, we had been in business for fourteen years when we decided it was time to give something back to the residents of our small town, this is when the idea of Pen Pals was born.
Our company has been doing business in Knysna for the past 19 years and in 2010 we made a decision to support our local community in projects whereby there would be financial or knowledge sharing. Our first project was titled “The Ball and the Pen” which involved shooting a series of photographs taken in the townships of the Western and Eastern Cape with the accent placed on football. An exhibition was held and half the profit from the sale of the prints was donated to the Crossroads Ladies Football team in Hornlee, they received R23 000 worth of football kit.
In 2011 we decided to do a training project involving high school children. The project is titled “Penpals”. The name Penpals was derived from a famous camera manufactured by the Olympus corporation in Japan and it is the digital Olympus Pen. We recruited 6 kids in our first year and all candidates attended photographic classes once a week for approximately eight months. The cameras were sponsored by Olympus, the outings, the end of year exhibition and all additional camera equipment needed to make the course viable was sponsored by our company. We are presently in our fifth year of running this project and for the last two years we have kept back 2 of the students to act as facilitators for the new intake of kids. In 2011 one of our students, Jason Alie, was nominated “Best Sea Scout in South Africa” and was sent over to London to an international Sea Scout gathering. We managed to persuade Olympus to give Jason his own Olympus pen camera to take with him on the trip.
We have taken in a intake each year, this year is our seventh year.
From 2018 we will only taking in four students with two intakes per year.