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It is not a surprise that photo journalism is not developed in Azerbaijan, where media lacks pluralism, professionalism and most importantly, freedom . In order to address this, IMS-established Azerbaijan Media Center offered a master class on press photography. The course was designed and facilitated by famous Danish press photographer, Tine Harden.  Radio Liberty’s photo reporter, Abbas Atilay who has become famous in Azerbaijan thanks to  his story-telling photos , was a co-trainer.

It was clear from the beginning that the training was not going to be a long lecture. The training was kicked off with a practical assignment. Training participants spent their Saturday night and Sunday shoorting military parade, narrow streets of Baku, porsch cars and boulevard, well they shoot everything to tell the story of their city and its life.

The training brought together some 15 participants. “ We received a lots of applications for training, Every Baku-based photographer demostrated interest. This time we had to select 15 best. We need more of this type of training to meet a growing need for photo journalism classes”, says Abbas Atilay.

Elmar Mustafazadeh, freelance photographer: “I liked the way the training was organized, especially the fact that we were offered an opportunity of working independently.  Tine’s  tips and recommendations were very important for us.  In future i would like to get more information on trainer's own projects and techniques she applies”

I want to thank AMM and, specially, Tine Harden and Abbas Atilay for well organized training”.,he stated.

According to Tine Harden, the students worked very hard . “I know I was very demanding “, she says. “ it was a plesure to see that some of participants growed a lot and seemed to understand much more what it is to be a photographer”

“Next time - I think it would be a good idea to have time with the student one by one. Typically - it was the last day that all the questions were asked. It would be nice to start with discussing everyones portfolio one to one ... Maybe the first night in a nice café”,- concluded Tine.

It is important to say, that Tine worked very hard in Baku, In addition to running the course she experienced Baku by making a lot of story-telling shots in the capital of Azerbaijan.

The best works of her an her Azerbaijani students will be at display at Azerbaijan Media Center in the beginning of fall.

Image by Gulnara Akhundova

"I have learned in these four days more than I have learned in three years of journalism training," the parting words of one of the enthusiastic Azerbaijani journalists after a four-day, intensive social media workshop at the Azerbaijan Media Center.

She was just one of the 25 journalists, bloggers and NGO workers who said they had picked up new skills and were keen to use them. In fact many had during the four days. Several said they felt they were now in the position to pass their new-found expertise to others.

And that's the biggest benefit of such workshops; building the capacity of local journalists and transferring skills so that they can then teach others what they have mastered.

Twitter - from a handful to a full house

When the course started only a handful were on Twitter, a few had blogs and, of course, all were on Facebook. By the end of day one all had set up profiles on Twitter, by the morning of day two all had Posterous blogs and were updating them and a team blog by email.

Day three saw them using curation tools such as Storify and Scoop.it to gather and share information assets, and by mid afternoon on the final day they were building interactive timelines using Dipity and interactive maps using Umapper.

They were using Hootsuite to find stories, Klout to check their Twitter influence and TweetEffect to try to find out which tweets worked and which lost them followers. Just before they left, several were invited to sign up for Quora, the online Q & A network.

Ready to transfer their skills to others

"I will definitely use all I have learnt in my work," said another who had successfully built an interactive timeline and map and embedded both in her blog in just a few hours.

Gulnara Akhundova, Project Manager for International Media Support at the Azerbaijan Media Center said that the initial feedback she had received was that all who took part had valued the course and reported that they had learnt a great deal.

"It seems everyone is extremely happy with the course and many said they had benefitted greatly," she said.

This article has been posted on the Media Helping Media Facebook wall where participants have been adding their comments. Thanks again to all.

Note: This article has also been posted on the Media Helping Media micro blog.

About the course

The course was designed and delivered by David Brewer, director of Media Ideas International Ltd, and founder and editor of Media Helping Media. The local co-trainer was Azer Nezerov @Azer_n, the translator was Parvana Persiani @parvanapersiani, who also helped run some sessions, and Valida Babayeva was on had at all times to take photographs and help participants set up their Twitter, Posterous, Storify, Dipity and Umapper accounts. The course was organised by the Azerbaijan Media Center and sponsored by the Council of Europe.

They have been arriving early and leaving late - that's always a good sign for media training.

The four-day Council of Europe sponsored social media training at the Azerbaijan Media Center included more than 25 participants with many more wanting to join.

By the end of day two a few had drifted away but what we were left with was the hard core of serious, dedicated and totally committed journalists who wanted to learn as much as they could about using social media to enhance their news gathering, news production and news dissemination skills.

With one more day to go they have learned how to use Twitter, how to update the microblogging site Posterous via email, and how to use curation tools.

Here are a few pictures of the team in action.

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Article uploaded by David Brewer the author of the course and director of Media Ideas International Ltd and founder and editor of Media Helping Media. David tweets @helpingmedia.

Day one of the four day course focused on Twitter, day two on Posterous and the third day on curation. As the 25 participants started to learn how to use the free online curation tools we realised that we had run out of invitations to Scoop.it. However, an email from the trainer, David Brewer, to the Scoop.it team resulted in the immediate offer of 20 new accounts - enough to enable the training to go ahead.  This story about Scoop.it's response was created with Storify.

[View the story "Scoop.it responds in minutes to Caucasus training need" on Storify]

A four-day social media course is taking place at the Media Merkez with journalism trainer David Brewer helping participants understand and use the latest social media tools.  Around 25 participants are expected to take part including journalists, bloggers, lecturers and NGO workers.  David Brewer runs Media Helping Media which has many free training resources for journalists and these have been used several times before in training in Baku, Azerbaijan.