How I learned (and am still learning) about photography

May 04, 2011

How I learned (and am still learning) about photography

While I still have a lot of room for improvement in the area of photography, I have to say that I’ve come a long way in the last few years. It wasn’t that long ago that I was snapping beauties like this one (cute subjects, crummy photo).

To be fair, I didn’t have any education about photography back then, a lousy camera, and subjects that weren’t very patient with being photographed. Nowadays, my kids are older, the camera is better, and I have a computer loaded with Photoshop Elements and Lightroom to make up the difference. I’ve taken classes, read articles, and even written articles about photography. Oh, and I’ve practiced! That makes the biggest difference!

It has taken a village to turn me into a photographer, and the cool thing is that most of that “village” is accessible to anyone with an internet connection! Here are the resources that have made the biggest impact on my learning:

Online classes taught by Katrina Kennedy at Get It Scrapped. I’ve taken Your Life through the Lens (not currently offered) and Your Kids Captured through the Lens (currently open for registration) and I loved both of them! Katrina is a great teacher and she’s the one that finally got me to understand how to use the settings on my camera dial. I totally recommend her! She also writes a monthly column for The Daily Digi about photography and runs a very cool website called CaptureYour365.com.

Online classes taught by Candice Stringham at JessicaSprague.com I took the Oh Shoot! class and the portraiture class and really enjoyed them both. Both classes were very useful and I learned a lot from doing the assignments. I printed out all the handouts from both of those classes and put them into a binder to study, which was really helpful. I need to do that with my Katrina handouts as well.

Reading (and writing) the photography posts at The Daily Digi. When Janet started the site, I was thrilled to read her photography tips because she is a great photographer. Now Katrina Kennedy writes the posts and she is so talented. I actually had the opportunity to write some of the photography articles there as well! If you really want to learn something, try teaching it – there is no better way to learn! Here are the photography posts I have written for TDD:

The internet! I read several photography blogs every day and have found many books and resources through the internet. I’ll be talking about them more throughout the month, but here are a few of my favorites: