CamerasOnly - Digital Photography Blog: Panasonic Workshops Complement Digital Camera Line for 2007

Panasonic LUMIX will launch the Digital Photo Academy, a new site and workshop series that will be held in 20 cities around the U.S., beginning in May 2007. The courses will be taught by photographers and experts in their local area, and will primarily focus on teaching owners of digital cameras how to take advantage of all their available features. The goal is to maximize students' creativity, make photography more enjoyable, and -- with additional knowledge and control of their photographic tools -- bring the quality of their digital images to a new level.

The digital photography workshops will offer three levels of courses:

Beginner - 3-hour course that covers red-eye reduction, creating scrapbooks and other basic digital photography skills useful even to those who own point-and-shoot digital cameras
Intermediate - 4-hour course that emphasizes the accuracy and flexibility of digital SLRs
Advanced - 2-day course that covers more advanced, "professional-level" photography skills

Even though the series is sponsored by Panasonic Lumix, attendees do not have to own a Panasonic camera to attend; students are welcome to bring any brand of digital camera to the workshops.

Panasonic Lumix has teamed up with R2Rainmaker Marketing to create the workshop series and to recruit the professional photographers and other photography experts that will serve as instuctors.

The Digital Photo Academy web site is currently under construction, but should be active by late-April 2007. It will allow visitors to view the workshop schedule, access class materials and read profiles of the instructors.

Panasonic Lumix has also been busy on the product side of the house, announcing a long list of new Panasonic Lumix cameras earlier this year.

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Typical of the high value in the new line is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8K. This camera offers a 7.2-megapixel CCD, Intelligent Image Stabilization, 11-point autofocus, and other features that are usually found in a much more expensive digital SLR. In addition, the camera has a 12x optical zoom Leica lens, which gives the equivalent of a 36mm to 432mm zoom lens in a 35mm film camera. In the DSLR world, a lens with this range will cost several hundred dollars on its own, yet Panasonic is offering the DMC-FZ8K for less than $350.00.

With its new line of Lumix cameras and new workshop series, there can be no doubt that Panasonic is committed to digital photography as an important part of its consumer electronics offerings.