No.  Now days there are some great free photo editors available for beginners and some very cheap alternatives to the Adobe products.  If you are planning on taking photography seriously, then a good photo editor and image catalogue tool like Lightroom is essential.

Your camera choice can vary depending on what type of photography you are in to.  Most modern camera’s are perfectly capable of producing great images in many conditions, but if you particularly want to take sports and wildlife photo’s, you should look at cameras with high frame rates.

What about Sony or any of the other brands?  Buying into a camera system is a long term investment.  I would recommend buying a camera that is the same brand as most of your friends cameras.  This way you can share your knowledge and even lenses!

There are some great image editors on the iPad, but storage is it’s biggest problem.  You will take a lot of photos and external storage is getting so cheap these days that you will soon have far too many photos that even the largest capacity iPad can handle.

Raw is a digital image format supported by most image editors and camera manufacturers. Should you be using it, well as long as you know how to process them. RAW image format is covered in the photography basics course available through the training page.

Certainly. Gift vouchers are available for all training courses and photography services.