For those interested in very hands-on advise on using artificial light, the Strobist [1] blog is amazing. David Hobby is a working photojournalist and does fantastic work on-site. It's one thing to control light in the studio, but quite another to bring your flashes to a random site and improvise.
Hobby used to have a DVD set for sale which was probably the best money I've ever spent on photography stuff, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available anymore. (It appears he's got some videos on Lynda.com, however.) I understand technical aspects of photography quite well but I learned a ton about creative, improvisational lighting from Hobby.
I second this. David's site opened my eyes to the importance of colour correcting the light coming out of your (off-camera) flashes for artistic effect, and a rough understanding of colour theory is what helps give images that extra "pop"
Light Science & Magic[1] is another fantastic one which has a ton of practical studio lighting in great depth and a good high-level overview of a lot of the physics that drives it(polarizing filters, etc).
Sounds excellent. In essence, this course doesn't teach you photographing but rather, how to maximise what you get out of a digital photograph. Definitely taking it, such a short course anyway.
I wonder if the actual photographying is taught in any (free) online courses? I've enjoyed the little nugget called "FART for Fantastic Photos" [0] by Ken Rockwell, especially how it in its simplicity reminds one to focus on the subject, that's what matters in the picture. Kinda hope there would be courses that take the same idea but for 10 hours or so.
It's fashionable to hate on him, but a lot of his advice is very good. The blog post you link to is quite silly and petty, honestly. A lot of people don't like to be told that their $5000 equipment is only slightly superior in terms of image quality to much cheaper equipment, but it's true.
The point is that he just tells you everything is amazing and to please buy it from Amazon so he can support his ever growing family.
And sometimes his advice is good, sometimes it isn't but as a newbie you don't know which part you can trust and which one is one of his peculiarities. Therefore I would avoid following his opinions. His list of camera/lens specs is admittedly pretty good.
And the other issue is that his photos are so comically bad that I kinda have problems taking whatever he says seriously.
He doesn't tell you everything is amazing. He usually seems skeptical, IMO, which is what one would expect from an old-timer in any profession (wish there was a little more of it in tech). Tells you that L lenses are nice, but he buys and uses non-L because it works equally fine for him (and yes, I know he primarily appears to use Nikon anyway :P). Says this about most expensive things.
I've personally noticed a large difference in the mechanical performance (not necessarily the image performance) of my L v. non-L lenses and thus prefer Ls. I have non-Ls but they get used a lot less because they're heavier, louder, and much slower to focus. This doesn't seem to bother Rockwell which is more than fine; he's probably a) much less spoiled than me and b) working in different environments where these issues are less serious.
Newbies never know who or what to trust. That's part of what makes you a newbie. You just have to come in and start trying things out and figuring out what does or doesn't work in your particular use case, and not stick religiously to random guy's blog if you find those techniques are not working for you.
You can't even pretend that's true. Pretty much every new Nikon camera body review he puts out is a long list of 'this is exactly the same', interspersed with 'these useless numbers are bigger'.
The only recommendations I think he's given in the past 5 or so years is the D600, D7X00 for crop, and the D750 when that came out. Hell, in the reviews for later versions of a camera, he usually recommends to get an older model used. And for newbies, it's always the base model.
His monetization strategy is straightforward and transparent.
FWIW, I agree it's not a great place to point newbies, but the cynical/shill angle is too far.
As a whole, I've found photography is a very petty niche, populated with many self-important prima donnas. I think it's really easy to make something that appears to be a "good picture", so practically everyone feels like a photographic expert whose authority on the niche should be respected. This is amplified in photography because it's very hard to make a living in it, and a lot of people feel jealous and resentful to the few who are able to do so.
There's also a common impulse in all niches to hate on whoever is popular and attracting a lot of newbies. Rockwell certainly does that.
While there are certainly things that even relatively-inexperienced photographers can find to disagree with Rockwell about, there is no doubt that his web site is useful and informative, especially as introductory material.
The linked article is picking nits. I wonder how old some of the traipsed up accusations are -- it appears the complaints re: RAW are 9-ish years old [0]. Rockwell talks about filling up 8 GB memory cards, which is a real concern when shooting multiple exposures in RAW. The difference is that now we have 128GB memory cards (which I can still get about 65% full in one night when shooting everything RAW+JPEG), faster cameras and computers, and there is little risk of RAW formats becoming unreadable.
It is also true that it takes a lot of effort to manually go through and process each individual RAW image. You either have to select a balanced preset that you think will work well and copy and paste it across the whole set and hope it turns out or spend 10-20 minutes making individual adjustments on each photo you want to use. It is very time-consuming. That hasn't changed much, though most of the compatibility and technical things he mentions are no longer issues even for photographers with budget gear.
He also has a follow-up where he argues that shooting in film is the "real RAW", which is an understandable position for someone who has spent a good deal of his life doing photography when film was the only option. [1]
His points there are solid, but personally, as an amateur don't-really-care-that-much photographer, I would never give up the convenience of digital or the photo-saving ability provided by RAWs.
Maybe if I was a better photographer "just shoot it right once instead of going back through for the second chance", as Rockwell recommends (though I'm not sure if he'd give that same advice today, almost a decade down the road), would be a feasible option, but it's not so right now. RAW combined with a miracle-grade processing pipeline (DxO) has saved my bacon many times.
The rest of the complainant's article primarily seems focused on Rockwell's spartan writing style. I think his bluntness and simplicity is a big reason for his success. Whereas many camera/lens review sites will swamp the reader with 25 middling pages of text that are mostly nonsense, Rockwell's reviews are a few pages long, have large, clean, detailed images of the reviewed item, clean section headers, and most sections have only two or three sentences.
There's no reason to get upset about Rockwell's personal opinions, which are what he shares on his personal site "kenrockwell.com". You don't have to agree. One of the reasons photography is so popular is because it's so subjective and there is tons of room for individual variation and freedom in basically everything. Let's not get too worked up here.
> Sounds excellent. In essence, this course doesn't teach you photographing but rather, how to maximise what you get out of a digital photograph. Definitely taking it, such a short course anyway.
I had a similar thought when I was browsing the content.
If anyone knows any classes that get closer to the idea of teaching concepts around composition, intent etc. I'm also interested! It's been a struggle to find something in this middle ground between 'this is a digital camera' all the way to a full on BFA. FWIW, I'm in NYC and open to in-person classes too if anyone knows anything in the area.
I think it's especially valuable as it approaches the problem from the opposite end. In photography, you have a scene and you're trying to frame it. In painting, you start with just a frame and decide how to fill it. That forces you to start with a few strong compositional elements and elaborate from there. It gives you an intuition for the minimum needed for a coherent image.
The problem with teaching this stuff with photography, and the reason the classes you seek don't really exist, is that it's very difficult to communicate about it via a camera. On a painting, you can sketch to start and have an instructor come by and ask questions about why things are positioned in certain ways, what else you might do, etc. With photography, you have to instead select and pare down to the desired image.
Painting is about intention.
Photography is about selection.
In the end, they become the same thing, reach the same goal, but the learning process is dramatically different.
Chances are really good that your favorite photographer has a background in art, too.
Ask around in your local arts scene. Many professional photographers offer short courses to small groups of people.
I agree this HES course's, umm, focus, is about camera engineering rather than how to use the camera.
They could have mentioned how to use nice glass for composition. For example, mobile phone cameras are great. The best reason these days to schlep a CAMERA camera instead of a phone is the lens. Do you want a big aperture (narrow depth of field)? Bring your CAMERA. Do you want a super long lens for making pictures of faraway stuff. Bring your CAMERA.
Some CAMERAs have another cool hack. You can put them in to black-and-white mode and their viewfinders show black and white. That's a great way for an amateur photog to learn to see light unconfused by color.
> You can put them in to black-and-white mode and their viewfinders show black and white. That's a great way for an amateur photog to learn to see light unconfused by color.
FWIW, I think this is a bad idea in general. For digital photography, black and white conversion should be done in post, where you can both keep the color information in case you need it later, and where you can play around with setting different luminosity settings for different colors of light.
Playing around with that will give you a much better idea of what sorts of black and white images you can turn a color image into.
Here are a couple examples of the different effects you can get from the same color source:
Both images are from the same source; one was edited to simulate a red filter on the lens; one was used to simulate a blue filter. As you can see, the effect is profoundly different; using an in-camera "black and white" mode gives up the ability to learn those differences.
When my camera is in B&W mode, no data is thrown away. The raws are the same, still color. It may be different for non-canons, though I doubt it, and it is different if you are producing jpegs obviously.
In a similar vein, not letting the camera do the B&W conversion in the viewfinder will train your eye to look for tonal differences and will help you see possible B&W compositions before you bring your camera to your face.
I was a bit surprised that the lesson on software tools focused on Photoshop instead of Lightroom. Photoshop is cream of the crop for precise image adjustments, but Lightroom is such a great photo management software plus visual editor.
Don't get me wrong - Photoshop is great. But Lightroom is one of the most user friendly digital asset managers (DAM).
This appears to be an (illegitimate?) republishing of a course that Dan Armendariz has taught at the Harvard Extension School since 2008. (The course number has since changed from CS E-7 to Digital Media E-10.) You can find the fall 2015 materials available online for free, better-organized and without advertising, at http://digitalphotography.exposed.
If you find these materials helpful, or want feedback on your work, consider enrolling in the course through the Extension School [0]! Part of your tuition inevitably supports the Harvard bureaucracy, but Dan and his teaching fellows's stipends are directly tied to the number of students who enroll in the course, and they've kindly made the entire course available for free. You can also apply that course credit to an Extension School degree, which is worth more than whatever certificate of completion Alison is providing.
Edit: I suppose I should note that the instructor for the current Extension School offering appears to have changed in the last year, so your mileage with the current version of the course will vary.
The link seems to have been changed to the one you provided[0]. I guess this was posted to another page, hosted by someone else taking credit for the videos and resources of the course?
[0] I was originally a bit lost at your comment and then connected the dots.
The site doesn't seem to be legit - there was a big reddit thread on r/photography yesterday: this post [0] sums it up, and actually links to the actual Harvard course.
> "There’s also a thirteenth module which serves as an assessment of all you know. If you pass this with a score of 80 percent or higher, and you can get yourself a diploma to print and hang on your wall."
Anyone know if it's a Harvard Diploma/Certificate that you get? I'm guessing it's probably not.
Hobby used to have a DVD set for sale which was probably the best money I've ever spent on photography stuff, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available anymore. (It appears he's got some videos on Lynda.com, however.) I understand technical aspects of photography quite well but I learned a ton about creative, improvisational lighting from Hobby.
[1]: http://strobist.blogspot.com/