[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!