[jfernandez]

> 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.

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

Since Ken is being brought up in this thread, I think I'll share my favorite view of his: you should take a painting class.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/what-is-photography.htm

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.

[OliverJones]

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.

[haikuginger]

> 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:

http://imgur.com/a/xDrkj

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.

[uxp100]

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.

[jxcl]

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.

[girvo]

Fujifilm lets you do in-camera RGB filtering for black and white. Which is quite fun to play with!

[Xunxi]

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/photography-basics you can audit individual courseware for free if that helps

[rkda]

The Bastard's Book of Photography might be what you want :)

http://photography.bastardsbook.com/toc/