January 2026 Fully Mentored Four Week Photobook Course With Stewart Wall

Course Introduction

Thank you for signing up for this fully mentored four-week photobook workshop. I’ve designed this course to guide you through the exciting and rewarding process of creating an engaging, well-crafted photobook, using Affinity Publisher. Over the last few years, the world of self-published photobooks has grown significantly—becoming a vibrant and expressive activity for photographers of all backgrounds. It’s a great way of sharing our photography with others.

In 2020, I was invited by the Royal Photographic Society to develop the criteria for their new Photobook Distinction. I had the honour of chairing the assessments for the first two years and saw some truly remarkable and diverse submissions. If your goal is to create a photobook for RPS Distinctions, I’m more than happy to support you in that process. But what excites me most about photobooks is their enduring value. A photobook isn’t just a way of presenting images—it’s a lasting memory, a time capsule, and a personal or cultural record. Whether your book is shared with the world, with family, exhibited in galleries, or quietly archived on a bookshelf, it becomes something meaningful that can outlive trends and technology.

I think of photobooks as a way of creating future heritage: the act of telling stories about the way we live our lives today in a thoughtful, tangible way as a legacy for generations to come. I am pleased to be working with you.

📚 Course Content Overview

This fully mentored four-week photobook course is designed to provide you with the structure, support, and resources needed to take your photobook project from concept to completion. You are very welcome to ask questions about anything concerning photography and photobooks. Here’s what to expect:

🖥️ Weekly Zoom Meetings

The course begins and ends with live Zoom sessions, although I would hope we all stay in touch after the course ends. The first week’s zoom starts at 4pm, and then the following ones start at 6pm, each one lasting for approximately 90 minutes. They are an opportunity to explore that week’s focus, ask questions, and share progress. The zoom meetings are only open to course attendees and use the same zoom link each week.

Zoom Meeting Schedule:

• Week 1 – Sunday, January 11th at 4pm
• Week 2 – Sunday, January 18th at 6pm
• Week 3 – Sunday, January 25th at 6pm
• Week 4 – Sunday, February 8th at 6pm

📹 All sessions will be recorded, so don’t worry if you’re unable to attend live—you can catch up at your own pace.

🧑‍💻 Basecamp Group

Attendess have access to a dedicated Basecamp project space, where you can:

• discuss the course lessons
• Ask questions
• Share feedback
• Connect with both Stewart and fellow participants throughout the course

This is your virtual studio space—open 24/7 for collaborative discussion and support.

💬 Mentoring Support

Stewart is available throughout the course to provide one-to-one guidance, usually via email but also via one2one zoom meetings if required. Whether you need feedback on your sequence, layout suggestions, or support preparing your file for print, mentoring is there to help you stay on track.

🎥 Online Modules and Video Lessons

Throughout the course, you will have access to a series of online learning modules to guide you through the process of designing a great photobook. Each weekly sections go live on the Sunday. If you get stuck with any of them please email Stewart who will guide you through.

You can also download the above information via the file download below

Weekly Agenda

Week 1: The Secret of Creating A Great Photobook – Creating The Foundations

Imagine someone arrives with 1,000 bricks and announces they want to build a house.
They place the bricks straight onto the soil and begin stacking them carefully, one on top of another. At first, it looks promising. The walls rise. The shape of a house begins to appear…. This is like turning up for this course with a set of images, going straight into Affinity and designing your zine or photobook.

Back to the house, before long, the ground starts to shift. The walls crack. Doors won’t sit straight. Eventually, the whole structure begins to sink and fail — not because the bricks were poor, but because there were no foundations beneath them….. You might create a great photobook without planning, but the likely outcome of rushing straight to Affinity is a book of photographs where the only point of interest is looking at the photographs!

Anyone with building experience would say the same thing:
You don’t start with the house — you start with the foundations.
You prepare the ground. You lay hardcore and shingle. You create a solid base that can carry the weight of what comes next.

A photobook works in exactly the same way. We begin the course by laying strong foundations. While it’s tempting to jump straight into design with Affinity Publisher, the most successful photobooks are built on carefully prepared content and a clear concept.

This week is all about understanding what makes a photobook great, developing your own idea, and preparing your materials for design.

Many photographers arrive at a photobook course with hundreds — sometimes thousands — of photographs. These photographs are their bricks. And like bricks, they may be strong, well-made, and full of potential.

But photographs alone do not make a photobook.

Before we open Affinity Publisher — before we think about page size, layouts, or sequencing spreads — we need to prepare the foundations. These foundations are the assets of the photobook:

• A clear concept — what the book is about, not just what it contains
• A narrative intention — how the story will unfold and what the reader is invited to experience
• A carefully sequenced set of photographs — chosen for meaning, rhythm, and relationship, not volume
• Text, where appropriate — not to explain the photographs, but to deepen and anchor them

Without these foundations, even a beautifully designed book can feel unstable — like a stack of images rather than a coherent work. With them, the design process becomes far simpler, more confident, and far more professional.

This is why Week 1 of this course is not about software.
It is about building the ground on which your photobook will stand.

By the end of Week 1, you will have:

1. A clear understanding of what a successful photobook looks and feels like
2. A strong concept and a clear sense of the experience you want to create for your reader
3. A well-organised folder structure containing all your key assets
4. A defined set of images selected specifically for your photobook
5. A considered image sequence that begins to tell your story
6. Text and a working title for your photobook

By the end of the week, you will have a complete set of folders and sub-folders containing your images and text, fully prepared for Week 2 — where we begin the Affinity Publisher design phase.

Week 2: Affinity Publisher — Creating Your Great Photobook / Zine

With your concept and assets in place, we now begin working in Affinity Publisher to create the first draft of your photobook. This week focuses on the core principles of book design and how to apply them using the tools and workflows within the software.

Rather than aiming for a finished book, the emphasis is on learning how to build pages that support your photographs and narrative.

By the end of Week 2, you will have:

• A solid understanding of Affinity Publisher’s key layout tools and features
• An initial photobook design draft, including image and text sequencing, pairings, and pacing
• A clear design direction and a growing sense of how to refine and strengthen your book as the project develops
• At the end of Week 2 you will decide whether to order a printed copy of your design. I recommend doing so because you will then use the printed copy to decide how well your screen is calibrated etc.

The aim is that by the end of Week 2 you will have designed your initial version of your photobook — ready to be reviewed, refined, and developed further in the following weeks, and possibly ordered a printed version.

Week 3: Design Refinement

With a working draft in place, this week is about looking again. We review, rethink, and refine your photobook to strengthen its visual flow, clarify its intent, and deepen the relationship between images, text, and sequence.

Iteration is a normal and necessary part of photobook making. Professional bookmakers often produce multiple drafts before arriving at a version that truly works. This week embraces that process — slowing down in order to make better decisions.

By the end of Week 3, you will have:

• A refined photobook design, suitable for test printing and final adjustments
• A concept and narrative that feel resolved, coherent, and purposeful
• First-hand insight into what transforms a collection of photographs into a compelling photobook

By the end of this week, your book should feel stable — conceptually and visually — giving you the confidence to move toward final decisions in the closing stage of the course.

Week 4: Final Edits, Printing, and Finding an Audience

In our final week, the focus shifts from making decisions on the page to bringing your photobook into the world. We look at final checks, preparing files for print, and making informed choices about paper, format, and production.

We also step back to consider what happens after the book is made. A photobook is not an end point, but a way of communicating your way of seeing — whether that is shared through exhibitions, photobook fairs, online platforms, or within your own creative networks.

By the end of Week 4, you will have:

• A finalised photobook PDF, prepared and ready for printing
• Your final photobook submitted to a printer (or ready to submit, depending on your chosen route)
• A clear next-step plan for presenting, sharing, or distributing your work

You will leave the course not only with a completed photobook, but with a practical understanding of how photobooks live in the world — and how yours might find its audience.

🎥 Final Zoom Meeting – Sunday, February 8th at 6:00 PM

This wrap-up session gives us all time to receive our printed photobooks, reflect on the process, and share outcomes. It’s also a space to talk about your next steps, future projects, and how to stay engaged with the photobook community.

Let’s enjoy this exciting journey together and create some great photobooks

Course Instructor

stewart wall Author

Stewart Wall is an experienced photographer and educator with over four decades in the industry. He started his career in 1978 when he was offered a job as a press photographer whilst still at school doing A Levels. He went on to work in many different fields of photography before returning to school in 2015 to complete a degree in Photography and Graphic Design, an MA in Photography and Visual Communication, and a Level 7 PGCE teaching qualification. He has taught in colleges and for the Royal Photographic Society and in 2020 was a recipient of the RPS Fenton Medal and made a life-long member for his contributions. It was the same year he wrote the criteria for the RPS Photobook Distinction and chaired the assessments for both that and the Licentiate award. Stewart is dedicated to teaching photographic technique, photobook creation, and visual storytelling, and continues to produce photography and photobooks as potential futureheritage.