Last week when I posted my review of the three photography books, I got a question from a reader that I answered privately, but that I also felt should be a blog post for everyone.
What the person was looking for was a resource to help them learn more about the mechanics of operating their camera, and the fundamentals of photography — what aperture is, what ISO means, how shutters work.
Modern cameras do a very good job of taking a picture and managing the details for you — to a degree. But you’re going to hit a point as you progress where the auto modes of the camera have one idea of how to take a picture, and you want to take a different picture. To make the camera take your picture instead of settling for the one wants to give you, you need to learn the concepts of photography and the mechanics of how a camera works and how to manipulate its settings to coerce it to do what you want.
You can study this via books — when I bought my Canon 7D I sat down with the Canon EOS 7D Digital Field Guide
But this is a teaching situation where I really think a teacher matters and not just reading the material, and finding a good teacher matters a lot.
Because of that, my recommendation for this is an online class by Creative Live, Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2013, which is taught by John Greengo. Greengo is a solid teacher and a travel photographer who’s also one of Art Wolfe’s assistants. This class is not inexpensive at $149 (although they run sales a few times a year that will bring the price down) but it’s a great value for the mass of material in it and the quality of the teaching. There’s about 25 hours of video that he taught over five days that covers every possible aspect of basic digital photography. I sat in on a number of sessions and I was impressed with the quality.
If you’re not familiar with Creative Live, you should be. Their format is pretty straight forward. They bring in people to teach classes on various topics and sell the videos of those classes. Where they’re a bit different is that all of their classes are taught with an audience that interacts with the teacher and asks questions, and when the class is being taught live, it’s streamed out to the universe and you can, if you wish, sit in on it for free — and the greater internet is also encouraged to ask questions and interact with the teacher along the way.
So you can literally take every class Creative Live ever teaches and never pay them a penny, if you want to sit in on them live (which typically means 9AM to 4PM Pacific Coast time). They also replay most sessions for free 2-3 times in the days after the live teaching. They typically have thousands of people around the world watching these live sessions. I will typically pick up sessions of interest to see whether it’s worth buying the entire course, which I can then stick on the iPad and watch in my free time. So far, Laurie and I have bought 10-12 of them. One note: if you buy the classes while they are being taught you can buy them at a nice discount, so it really makes sense to watch for classes of interest, take in some sessions in the first day or two of the class, and if you find it to be what you’re looking for, grab a copy for later viewing offline.
Creative Live’s core has been photography (not surprising, since it was founded by Chase Jarvis), but it’s been growing and branching out, and has been doing more video and business topics, and just started an audio curriculum that looks fascinating.
Greengo, by the way, does one-day, inexpensive courses around teaching you all about how to operate specific models of camera. That 7d book I bought back in the day? Today I’d look up the Creative Live class on the model instead.
You can keep an eye on upcoming classes with their calendar or look through their catalog to find classes of interest, or just watch the classes going on currently via their live feed. I can strongly recommend a few: Vision Driven Photography by David duChemin, Foundations of a Working Photographer by Zack Arias, The Ultimate Lightroom Workflow by Jared Platt, and Tabletop Product Photography by Don Giannatti.
The production quality at Creative Live is consistently high, the material that’s taught is also well-thought out and covered deeply but in an accessible way. It really is a key resource for people looking to improve themselves and looking to be taught new skills and introduced to new concepts — and without risk, because you can sample each class before you commit any money. Well worth keeping an eye on and grabbing classes that interest you.