Drip Dry McFleye wrote:
Has anyone taken this course? If so, what's your opinion? This presentation will be available in a city near me this month. At $99 I'm tempted but wonder if I will actually gain much from it. I'm not an expert photographer by any means but I certainly know about the exposure triangle, WB, etc. If anyone has experienced this presentation I'd sure like to know what you thought of it. Thanks in advance for your input.
Photography is not something you can learn easily from a crash course. There are so many facets - camera, post processing, composition, subject matter, etc that just cannot be covered in a single day. Besides, just like you can't learn how to drive from reading a driver's manual, photography is no different.
For $99 you can usually get a two year membership in a local photo club, which if the club has a lot of members, you'll be able to participate and learn a lot more than from a short course. Looking at his lesson plan:
1. Landscape - 7 topics -1 hour - camera gear, camera settings, focus stacking, long exposures, night sky and Milky Way, post processing. - less than 9 mins each -
2. 10 Things you wish you had learned sooner - how to self critique, examine your own bad habits, how to sell, how to market - this is a semester-long plan, compressed into 75 mins.
3. Portraiture - natural posing, lighting, rapport with subject, understanding flaws and strengths of a subject and using posing, lighting and rapport to get the best results. That sounds like a weekend workshop at the very least
4. Sharp Images - technique, settings and post processing - this is not going to be learned in an hour. Or a week. Or a month. Maybe a year or two.
5. Photo recipes: sounds like a final hour to reinforce the topics covered above - and I am sure a pitch to buy additional "stuff" - books, online courses, etc.
I'd suggest a local camera club - and never leave the house without a camera - even a cellphone - to capture stuff that looks photo-worthy. You'll get a lot more out of actually using your camera than attending a class. I am sure his seminars present good stuff. It's just that I question the value of a "crash course" where little can be covered in depth - when you really should be working with someone looking over your shoulder and asking you questions about your thought process and offering suggestions for alternate approaches. But that's just me . . .